


A Sword Hanging Above

by Cloud Walker (FassTDriver)



Series: Fluffly Reylo/Reyben AU [6]
Category: Reylo - Fandom, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: 1800 flirting style, Angst, Armitage is Ben's cousin, Ben Solo is from the colonies in Jamaica here, Ben and Rey both have previous relationships, Blakwood is Rey's cousin, Clothed Dry Humping, F/M, Fluff, I took some historical liberties, Jack was Rey's best friend and her pretended fiance, Mutual Pining, Rey Has Secrets, Reylo - Freeform, Secret club, Slow Burn but not too much, Some names have been altered to fit earth victorian-aged names, Victorian Times, bare with me, clash of clases, guys deal with it we all have a past, immediate burn but slow burn after, mentions of mental abuse, rich girl and not so rich guy, sex will be explicit, sexual abuse mentioned but it's not rey, star wars has some horrible names to adapt to real ones and they belong only in space, strong and fluffy Ben, strong and vulnerable rey, tags to be updated every now and then, the title "Chevalier" existed in french nobility
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:00:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 32,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27314452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FassTDriver/pseuds/Cloud%20Walker
Summary: Lady Regina "Rey" Read is independent, beautiful, and in need of a husband—now. The last man on earth she wants is the rogue who broke her heart six years ago, never mind that his kisses are scorching hot . . .Benjamin Archibald Solo is rich, scarred, and finished with women—forever. He's not about to lose his head over the bewitching beauty who once turned his life upside down.But Rey needs a warrior, and Ben is the perfect man for the job. Only as a married woman can she penetrate Scotland's most notorious secret society and bring a diabolical duke to justice. When Rey and Ben become allies—and passionate lovers—he'll risk everything to protect the only woman he has ever loved.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Reylo
Series: Fluffly Reylo/Reyben AU [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1469816
Comments: 87
Kudos: 109





	1. Prologue: Danger

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a million to Professor Ana María Carreras (professor of English Culture and Literature at UNSJ) for accepting the challenge to super beta this entire fic and thanks to my loving husband Alex for asking her to do this for me. 
> 
> This fic is already finished but I'll post it in chapters. It took almost a year to write. It started as an investigation on Victorian courtship and it ended being plagued of thoughts of Ben Solo in breeches. 
> 
> Dedicated to my husband for being my gentleman warrior, my real life Ben  
> and to my platonic inspiration and love, the one and only Adam Driver

April 1815

Fellsbourne, estate of the Marquess of Doreé

Kent, England

Of the dozen men in the room, he was the only man she should not be staring at. He was not a lord. Not an heir to a fortune. Not a scion of impressive lineage or a favorite of the prince. He wasn’t even really a gentleman. Yet she could not look away.

It shouldn’t have mattered; a hidden niche was an excellent place from which a young lady could spy on a risqué party. Until someone else discovered it. Unless that someone else were the right someone else. For four nights now no one had noticed her peeking from a door that could barely be called a door in the corner of the ballroom. These passages had been fashioned in an earlier era of rebellion, and everybody had long since forgotten them.

Except her.

And now him.

A quality of familiarity braided with danger commanded the breadth of his shoulders and the candlelight in his eyes as he watched her. Yet she did not duck back into the dark passage and escape. She had no fear that he would know her. Like the women who had actually been invited to the party, her mask hid the upper half of her face. Anyway, she knew no one in society. Her father had not yet taken her to London, only deposited her here at Fellsbourne, where he imagined her safe in the company of his dear friend’s family. Where she had always in fact been safe. Teased, taunted, treated like an annoying younger sister, and very carelessly acknowledged. But safe.

Until now.

Not removing his eyes from her, the stranger unfolded himself from the chair with predatorial grace. He moved like a hunter, lean and powerful and aware. Not entirely human. Even at rest he had watched the others, disinterested in the amorous flirtations of the other men and the women here to entertain them, yet keen-eyed. Like an elven prince studying mortal beings, he observed.

For four nights she had wondered, if she were one of those women would he be interested in her? Would he seek her attention? Would he touch her as the other men touched those women—as she longed to be touched—held—told she was special—good—beautiful? She was wicked to her marrow. Wicked to want a stranger’s notice. Wicked to relish the thrill in her belly as he walked straight toward her.

Under normal circumstances her tongue was lithe enough. But normal circumstances had never in her wildest misbehaviors included a man with eyes like his—honey, sweet and lucious yet clear and shining, like moonlight cast upon the waters of a forest spring. Perhaps he was not entirely human. This wasn’t Scotland. But England had its fair share of mystical beings too.

When he stood within no more than two wicked feet of her, her tongue failed.

“You were staring at me,” he said in a voice like fire-heated brandy—rich, deep.

“You were staring at me.” The low timbre of her own words startled her.

“One of us must have begun it.”

“Perhaps it was spontaneously mutual. Or it was coincidence, and both of us imagined the other began it.”

“How mortifying for us both then.” The slightest smile appeared at the corner of his mouth that was beautiful. Beautiful. She had never thought about men’s mouths before. She had never even noticed them. Now she noticed, and it did hot things to her insides.

“Or fortunate,” she ventured. She was grinning, showing her big teeth. But she couldn’t care. A young man was smiling at her, a young man with sun-darkened skin and whiskers cut square and scant about his mouth, like a pirate too busy marauding to shave for a day or two. Not very mystical, true. His hair was the color of the Tower's ravens, curving about his collar and swept dashingly back from his brow. A military saber hung along his thigh, long and encased in dark leather. Its hilt glittered.

He was staring at her lips, and so she stared at his. Giddy trills climbed up her middle.

Kisses.

His lips made her think of kisses. Want kisses. Kisses on her mouth. Kisses on her neck like those that the loose women got from the other men. Kisses wherever he would give them to her.

Wicked wicked wicked.

“Dance with me,” he said.

She darted a glance into the ballroom. All of the women wore costumes, scanty, sheer, slipping from shoulders beneath gentlemen’s bold fingertips. Jack was throwing a masquerade for his friends and these women. Women she should not envy. She should not be here. She should be at the dower house a quarter mile distant, where Eliza had drunk whiskey with dinner and now snored comfortably by the parlor fireplace.

“I cannot dance tonight,” she said with more regret than she remembered ever saying anything.

“Cannot? Or will not with me?” His tongue shaped words decadently, as though the syllables were born to kiss his lips and taunt her with what she could not have.

“If I could, I would only with you.”

He seemed to study her face: her too-big eyes, her too-small nose, the mouth that was too wide, brow that was too spotted, and cheeks that were too round. She knew her flaws, and yet he seemed to like studying them.

“What is your name?”

“I haven’t one.” Not that she could tell a stranger with elven eyes and pirate whiskers.

He smiled, and it was such a simple unveiling of pleasure that her heart thumped against a couple of her ribs.

“I will call you Beauty,” he said, then his brow creased. “But you have heard that before.”

“Then I suppose I must call you Beast,” she replied. She liked the tingling tension in her belly that he had deposited there with only his smile.

“For what I’m thinking now, you should,” he said quite seriously.

“What are you thinking now?”

“That your lips are perfection.”

She could not control those lips; they wobbled, smiled, disbelieved.

“Men have told you this before,” he said.

No one had ever looked at her mouth except to strike it when she misspoke.

“Why do you care what other men have said to me?”

“Because I wish to be the first, the most eloquent and original. Yet I cannot be that. And so I fail before the battle has begun.”

“Battle?”

“For your attention.”

“You have my attention. Entirely. This seems obvious to me.” She tried not to smile. “But perhaps you are slow-witted.”

“Undoubtedly,” he murmured and abruptly seemed closer, taller, larger. She could smell him, a scent of sun-warmed leather and bergamot that she could reach out and swallow.

“I would like to kiss you,” he said.

The explosion of excitement in her belly took her breath.

“I must go,” she whispered. But she did not go. This was wrong, wicked, disloyal in so many ways. But her feet would not obey her. She wanted to stay. She wanted to breathe him in and in and in.

His eyes gleamed with candlelight. “You haven’t been invited to this party. Have you?”

“No.”

“Are you a servant in this household?”

It was on the verge of her tongue to declare, “Yes!” and let him continue staring at her mouth and saying outrageous things. But something in his eyes said that he would know if she lied.

“I must go.” This time she did, darting back into the darkness.

She made her way swiftly along the narrow corridor, her slippers silent upon the floorboards, counting the steps in the complete dark to the exit. Many times she had hidden from Jack, Arthur, and John in these walls, spying on them, longing to be on the other side of the wall, longing to be welcomed into their games. Often she had climbed into shadowed corners in order to be near them without revealing herself. Whenever they discovered her, they ran. Boys will be boys, her nurse had said, to which she had replied that if that was so then boys were hurtful.

The stranger’s boot steps sounded behind her in the passageway.

“Don’t go. I beg of you,” he said into the blackness.

She obeyed and he came upon her in an instant.

“What did you hope to accomplish by entering that room?” he said and seemed close, the sound of his shoulders brushing the walls to either side, as if his frame filled all of the empty spaces in the corridor and inside her. Her head spun.

“I wanted to see it. I—”She could not lie, but she knew that she would be every kind of fool to reveal anything about herself. “I needn’t tell you.”

“You have been barred from the company,” he said with certainty. “No wonder.”

“No wonder?”

“Wolves prowl this place tonight. You are a lamb.”

She did not feel like a lamb. She felt like a Jezebel.

“Hardly. I have just turned eighteen,” she replied.

“Ah. A veritable crone.”

She liked his teasing. She liked it that he wished to tease her, that he followed her, and that he now stood too close.

“Your tongue is delightfully noble, sir. I am all gratitude.”

The air seemed to shift, to loosen.

“I cannot see you.” His hot-brandy voice was smoother now. “Have you just curtsied?”

“Of course. That compliment deserved it.”

“Compliment?”

She laughed. “You called me a crone.”

“Did I?”

“Indeed you did.”

“No. I couldn’t have. That must have been the other fellow in this blackened crevice with us. The lout. But fret not. I will dispatch him when we are finished here.”

“Finished?” Not so soon.

“Why did you stop when I asked you to just now?”

“You did not ask. You begged. I pitied you.”

Abruptly the tension returned, the air humming upon a delirious edge.

“Do you know you might be in danger from me?” he said at least several notes lower.

“If I were in danger from you, wouldn’t you now be endangering me rather than warning me of it?”

He seemed even closer—his heat and scent, his eyes that could not see her, and his mouth from which she wanted to drink kisses.

“Perhaps I will endanger you yet.” He spoke with a roughness that shimmied up her insides.

“You won’t,” she said, her fingers bunching in her skirts.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I want you to. And I could not be so fortunate for once to have such a wish fulfilled.”

“Girls like you . . .” He seemed to hesitate. “Girls who play at danger get hurt.”

“What if I’m not playing?” She could barely breathe.

He said nothing, and the silence wrapped around her.

“What can you be about, I wonder,” he finally said. “Were you spying in the ballroom?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the lucky man?”

“What if I only intended to peek through that crack in the door?” The first night. The first night she had been merely curious. “What if I had been watching it all in disappointment and increasing boredom, on the cusp of relinquishing my vigil in favor of the book on my bedside table?”

“Boredom?”

“Just because I have never before seen debauchery doesn’t mean I know nothing about it.” He needn’t know that the first night she had been a bit sickened watching Jack’s party, eager to return to the dower house and Eliza’s familiar company.

He chuckled. “Then what, oh easily jaded one, held you back from the superior enticement of your book?”

“I saw you.” And she had felt things inside of her that she had never before known she could feel.

Wicked.

“Now I will kiss you,” he said a bit urgently, “and be damned for it.”

“Why? Is it a sin to kiss a woman?”

“A woman, not typically. A girl like you, yes.”

“Then pretend I am only a woman tonight.” She spoke upon a tightrope.

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow . . .” She went onto her tiptoes, tilted her chin upward, and leaned into his heat. She would seize this delirium for only a moment, a forbidden moment that felt like the most honest thing she had ever done. “Pray for us both.”

She thought he would kiss her. Some of the other men had walked straight up to the loose women and kissed them on the lips without even asking. Instead she felt the briefest brush of his arm against hers, the heat of his hand momentarily near her face.

Then a tweak of pain.

She jerked her head forward.

“Ouch!” The half-mask fell away from her face and she was naked, her face entirely revealed. But in the blackness he certainly could not see her.

“Forgive me,” he said, not particularly contritely.

“You caught my hair.” Happiness bubbled in her. “You might have asked, you know.”

“Do you need it again?”

“The mask or my hair?”

“If you were mine, I would buy you combs inlaid with diamonds to adorn your hair.” The words caressed.

“Can you afford diamonds?”

“Mm . . . No.”

“Combs?”

“No.”

“Wildflowers, then.”

“Wildflowers?”

“Adorn my hair with wildflowers and I will dance for you upon the meadow. Like a faery maiden.” With her prince. “Would you like that?”

“Quite a lot, I suspect.” She heard him breathe deeply. She had never listened to another person breathing before, not like this, in the darkness, hearing so acutely because she could not see. It was deliciously intimate.

“I think I should like to linger for a moment now in this imaginary scene on the meadow,” he said.

“Would you?”

“But I need more details. For instance, what will you wear for this performance?”

“It will not be a performance. Rather, a celebration of freedom.”

“Freedom from what?”

“From everything.” From loneliness. “So I will probably wear something shockingly immodest. White. Sheer. You know the sort of thing, I daresay.”

“I’m beginning to understand how the scene in the ballroom bored you. Who are you?”

She had gone too far. She knew it. She reveled in it.

“Just a girl, as you have said.” She tried to sound breezy. “A girl who wants her first kiss to be with you.”

“I am glad to oblige you in that.”

Yet still he did not kiss her. Instead his hand closed about her shoulder and she inhaled sharply. His touch felt warm and strong through the fabric of her gown. Then a single fingertip traveled slowly to the gully at the base of her throat. A shudder rippled through her.

“Oh.” She ached, wanting more of this touching in a deep well of wanting she barely recognized.

“Tell me to stop,” he said like the rumble of a storm.

“No man has ever—I’ve no’ been touched.” She was revealing herself, the naïve innocent who could be easily seduced. But it was too late. With a few words and a single caress he had already seduced her. She was the greatest wanton alive. “I cannot believe this is happening to me,” she whispered.

“Then we are as one in disbelief.” He was close, so close.

His lips brushed across hers and heaven descended. Dawn broke. Stars showered. From lips to knees she awoke in an explosion of tingling wonder.

“Sweet heaven,” she rasped and grappled in the dark for him.

His lips were soft, his arms hard as she cinched her fingers around them—male and alien and thrilling. And very swiftly all she wanted was more. More soft lips and hard arms, more of their breaths mingling, more of a young man in her hands and on her mouth. This man, whose hand cupped her face and urged her mouth against his, whose lips grew firm and tasted good. Tasted. She had never known a man had a flavor. Or textures, soft and firm and rough and smooth all at once. She had never known the caress of another person’s breaths on her cheek.

She had been missing a lot.

Climbing up his arms that were wonderfully muscled, her fingers clenched around his shoulders. So unfamiliar the smooth wool coat against her hands, so alien his fingertips stroking the edge of her hair, so strange and delicious and intoxicating and she wanted more.

She pressed her lips harder to his, but it did not suffice. She still wanted more, much more. Something was missing . . . Something would be better if . . .  
She opened her mouth.

And felt it all. And understood why the men and loose women at the party embraced each other as they did—why there was nothing better than this—why she would never, ever get enough.

She made sounds, noises from her throat, without meaning to; they erupted on her breaths that he was taking with his kisses. He didn’t seem to mind. Both of his hands wrapped around her face and he drew her up to him and she went onto her toes and their mouths were fused, giving and taking and melding and melting and hotter each moment. She was hot all over, in her throat and thighs and everywhere. The power of his arms beneath her palms made her wild inside. She could eat him, taste him and seek him like this, deeper with each breath, more desperate to have, to possess. All of him. She felt the tip of his tongue touch the edge of her lips and she moaned aloud.

“Tell me to stop,” he said harshly. “Push me away.”

“I cannot.” Her lips sought his again, demanding his kisses. “You must take yourself away. For I find that I cannot make you go.”

He did not take himself away. He held her in his hands and the universe became him—his mouth, his heat, his tongue caressing her lips, her teeth, her tongue. She whimpered, gripped his shoulders, and let him inside her.

And then they were apart, he was putting her away, and she was standing alone in the blackness with damp lips and frantic breaths and empty hands.

“I’ve got to go,” he said firmly.

“I know,” she cried. “I know. Will you . . . ?”

“Will I . . . ?” He sounded oddly choked.

“Will you be sorry?”

“For kissing you?”

“For leaving me?” she said a little desperately.

“Yes. So, perhaps you should leave instead.”

“If you suggest that because you believe I won’t be as sorry to leave as you, you are mistaken, sir.”

She heard him shift, and the sound of his taut breathing.

“We are already having our first disagreement,” he said. “That’s a poor sign, you know. Clearly we are doomed right from the start. Probably best to end it straight off.”

She laughed. “All right. Though I thought we might allow it another ten seconds.”

“It?”

“This.”

“This? Standing in blindness? Not touching? I won’t survive another ten seconds.” He sounded certain.

“How do you know that?”

“I have the wisdom of age and experience to guide me.”

Oh.Oh.

“Experience,” she mumbled, the joy slipping away. “With women, I suppose.” Of course. She was immeasurably silly.

“I say to you now,” he said in a new voice, “with complete honesty and in all sincerity, with no hope of anything at this moment beyond being heard: in this thorough darkness your face is more clearly etched upon my memory than that of every other woman I have met.”

He was immeasurably silly too, it seemed. And perfect.

“Half of my face.” She smiled.

“Granted.” His voice smiled back at her. “And your eyes.”

She chewed on her lip. It tasted raw. “It cannot be true that you see my face and no others now.”

“I tell you it is God’s truth.”

A tiny ray of hope lit her insides. “Really?”

“Go,” he growled like the beast she had called him. “Now. Go.”

She must. She thought perhaps that he was trying to be good. Trying to stop them from kissing again. Kissing more. Kissing too much. She never wanted to go.

“All right.” Touching the walls to either side, she backed up. “Good night, sir.” Then she had to turn away, because the ache inside her was no longer pleasurable.  
In the darkness he found her wrist. He took it, lifted it, kissed it. She sighed.

He kissed her palm, the tips of her fingers, and she could not breathe, could barely stand on knees that had turned to jelly. Sensation ripe and hot and wonderful overcame her.  
He opened his hand, allowing her freedom. She made her feet move, made herself draw her hand away, trailing her fingertips across his callused palm until she felt him no more.

“Good night,” he said.

Then she was alone again, walking swiftly through the darkness. Alone with a secret and a painfully quick heartbeat and a new ache of loneliness in her throat and chest that in all her eighteen years of solitude she had never imagined possible.

Stealing through shadows, she made her way out of the big house and then walked the quarter mile along the wooded path to the dower house. The moon was bright and her lips felt especially soft, and she knew she ought to feel guilty but she did not.

Later in her bed, sleep did not easily come. He was there now, at the big house. She knew every room in Fellsbourne. She could find him tonight. Go to him. If she dared.  
And do what? She wasn’t that girl. She was many awful things. But she was not that girl. She wasn’t really sure what being that girl entailed, anyway.

When morning came she arose before dawn, bleary-eyed and subdued. Strapping on her bow, she saddled Elfhame and rode to the woods. Eliza wanted hare stew, and hares were aplenty at the edge of the woods. She knew well enough the usual habits of the men who attended Jack’s parties. No one would leave the big house before noon. Today she would not be discovered.

When she reached the woods, she dismounted and tethered her horse to a sapling. Through the mists that rose from the earth in soft clouds, she swiftly espied her prey. At the edge of the trees, it feasted on clover. She halted and watched it. Innocent creature. It had no idea that it could be eaten for dinner.

Drawing an arrow from the quiver on her back and setting her stance with silence born of years’ practice, she lifted her bow and nocked the shaft. Siting her target, she pulled back the bowstring.

A stick crackled nearby. The hare’s ears popped up. Abruptly, it bounded into the underbrush. She leaped forward but it was too late. Wise little creature after all, to recognize danger and react so swiftly.

Blowing out a frustrated breath, she pivoted to the ruiner of her hunt. And every sleep-deprived mote of her body came to life.

In the misty dawn he seemed even more like an elven prince than by candlelight, his eyes silvery and fixed upon her with great intensity. Not merely a prince. A warrior. He wore the same coat as the night before, a bit wrinkled now, and his dark hair was tousled. The sword at his side looked so fearsome and his stance so powerful and certain, that he seemed at once like the most ordinary man and the most extraordinary god.

“You were not a dream,” he said—ridiculously, wonderfully.  
“I am not a dream,” she replied, smiling, and knew that it would be the simplest thing in the world to pretend now that she was not in danger.


	2. The Teacher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TAGS HAVE BEEN UPDATED
> 
> About Ben's Title: Chevalier, (French: “horseman”), a French title originally equivalent to the English knight. Later the title chevalier came to be used in a variety of senses not always denoting membership in any order of chivalry; it was frequently used by men of noble birth or noble pretensions who could not claim any of the standard territorial titles. An ordinance of 1629 tried to forbid its being assumed except by virtue of royal letters patent or “eminence of personal quality” (éminence de qualité personnelle). A younger son of a great family, however, who could not claim a title by other means might be admitted to the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta) and thereby assume the title of chevalier. Chevaliers of the French royal orders usually had some territorial title by which they remained designated; but it was questionable whether the nobility attached to the title was hereditary. Napoleon outlined conditions for the assumption of the title by members of the Legion of Honour and reserved the right to himself of appointing chevaliers of the empire.

March 1822

The Sheep Heid Inn

Duddingston, near Edinburgh, Scotland

Benjamin Archibald Solo, Chevalier de Saint-André could hold his sword, liquor, and woman with equal skill. Unlike any other man Miss Annie Favor had enjoyed in her nineteen years, he could do so all at once. Fond of weapons in the bedchamber, Annie welcomed the sword dangling from Ben’s hip when he threw her upon the bed in a tangle of skirts and laughter and got to business. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a man with shoulders like a cavalry steed’s and eyes as beautiful as the Queen’s own opal tiara came into the Sheep Heid Inn in the little village of Duddingston.

“Good sir,” she sighed some time later as he rolled away from her and sat on the edge of the bed to tug his breeches over his tight bum. “Will ye do it again? An’ again?” she said with satisfaction, watching him pull on his boots.

Lean muscles in his back and arms twisted beneath a sheen of moisture. She could not see now the scar that stretched across half his chest and waist. But she knew it was there and it gave her delicious chills. She trailed her fingertips down one impressively taut arm as he drew on his shirt.

“I want to be able to tell my father all aboot it come Saubath,” she said. “Just after he preaches on the evils o’ fornication.”

Slowly swiveling to face her, he set his opal eyes upon her. Like a river beneath sun, they glittered. Annie’s tongue got abruptly dry.

“I’ve never seen such eyes,” she whispered. “Be ye a demon come to steal my soul?”

The mouth that had moments earlier made her shout into the rafters now curved into the Devil’s own smile.

“Sweet, sweet Annie. Your father is a man of the cloth?”

Relaxing back against the pillow, she grinned. This was her favorite part.

“He be the vicar o’ Duddingston Kirk.” She allowed her eyelids to droop. “I’m vexed to say, he’s a birsie one. Why, the last man he found me with, he scourged up an’ down the causey. But he couldna find his walkin’ stick, so he used a carriage whip.”

For a moment he regarded her with those eyes of otherworldly intensity. Then he threw back his head and laughed. Annie did not know quite what to do. No man before had ever laughed. She let her fingers slip from his waist to the sword he strapped anew to his hip, caressing the hilt. “Have ye ever used this on a woman?”

His laughter halted. Quicker than a single breath, the blade whipped free of its scabbard and laid flat across her throat. Heavy and cold, it pressed into her flesh. She tried to scream but found no air for it.

“Not yet, Annie, my girl.” His voice was deep, husky, just like when he’d been inside her. He leaned down and his next words brushed over her gasping lips. “Never been suitably tempted.”

When he went from the room, he left a gold coin on the table and a curse curling off of her tongue.

********************************

“Speed in all else, but with the ladies always a gentleman,” drawled a man of fiery locks and emerald-colored eyes from the taproom chair in which Benjamin had left him earlier. “That, despite the drink. You put the rest of us to shame, cousin.”

Solo settled into a chair but did not take up his glass. The girl’s enthusiastic ministrations had not filled the icy hole in his gut. More whiskey would not either. His brother, Torquil, had always accused him of having a hollow leg, or alternately that he was so quick he could toss the contents of a glass under the table without anyone noticing.  
Tor might have been right about the hollow leg. For, despite how much he’d drunk in the past two days since they crossed into the Borders—in the two months since his brother had died—he was not intoxicated.

His inestimable cousin, Armitage Huxley, Lord Michaels, however, was.

“That redheaded minx upstairs is not a barmaid,” Benjamin said. “She is the progeny of the vicar of this village,” playing a game of How naughty can I be before Papa whips my lover with a stick? The games women played never ceased to astonish him. Armitage’s glass arrested halfway to his mouth.

“Good God, Benny. Don’t say you’ve docked a preacher’s daughter? For an entire hour, no less! Hell’s fire, he’ll drag you to the altar for it.”

“I daresay in this case he would account an hour or a minute all the same.”

Armitage cast drink-soaked eyes at the other tavern patrons and said in a hush, “You’re a duck waiting to be shot here now. D’you want to be leg shackled to a Scots jade?” He tried to stand, but wavered. “Tor would’ve quit this place the minute he learned the strumpet’s secret.”

“Come now. You did not think her a strumpet an hour ago, when you imagined her a girl of the trade.”

Huxley nodded. “True. But, the modesty of a gentlewoman . . .” He waved his hand about. “Strong appetites ain’t the thing for a lady. Tor could spot a strumpet from leagues away.”

Solo settled more comfortably into the cushioned leather and lifted his glass. “To my brother, the smartest son of a bastard this earth has known.”

“Nossir,” Huxley slurred as he fell back into his chair, all danger from irate Men of the Cloth apparently forgotten. “Won’t toast to that rakehell. Rather, to my cousin Benjamin, the finest son of a French born- Jamaica Exiled-scoundrel this side of the Atlantic. Both sides.” He swallowed the remainder of the spirits then set down the glass with a clunk, and peered at a letter on the table beside it. “Read wants a tutor for his ward,” he said abruptly.

A slow heat bloomed in Ben’s gut, dead center of the ice. “Read?”

“Duke’s got a nephew or grandson or some such. Favor to Blackwell, don’t you know. Rather, no . . . Blackwood, that is. Damn whiskey.”

There was no making sense of Armitage when he was foxed. But this merited clarification.

“The Duke of Read?” Carefully, as though it were a directive from a general, Benjamin pinched the sheet of finely pressed paper between thumb and forefinger.

“‘My uncle, presently in residence at Castle Read,’” he read aloud, and then to himself. When he finished, he looked up at his cousin. “What is this?”

“Th’ reason we’re here, cousin,” Huxley said.

“You gave me to believe that there was a girl in Edinburgh,” Ben said perhaps too languidly. “A girl you intend to court. A girl whose family would not bring her to licentious London again on account of their Puritan ways. A girl who had promised her hand to you in secret and whom you wish to marry.”

Huxley sighed. “A pearl of a girl.”

Benjamin set the letter down on the table.

“It’s a favor,” his cousin said. “Debt of honor. Played cards with Blackwood. Years ago. Lost. Emptied the coffers to pay him, but it wasn’t enough. Said I’d make it up to him someday.”

“Presumably you have not yet?”

“Couldn’t. Can’t.”

Huxley’s estate was entailed, his lands secure, but poorly productive; he never had money to spare. Tor had been the best of them at making gold hand over fist, because he had made it illegally.

“Blackwood said th’ old duke needs a tutor for his ward.” Armitage’s curls wiggled over his brow. “Can’t refuse.”

“A tutor? How awful is this boy that a duke cannot keep an actual tutor employed? You are a baron, for God’s sake, Hux. Not a schoolteacher.”

“Not sums and French. Fencing. Boy’s got the rudiments. Needs technique. A few months, s’ all. Brief stint.”

Ben frowned. Sums or swordplay, this did not add up. “Armitage?”

His cousin offered him a saturnine frown. Above his lavender coat, it lent him a decidedly clownish air. “Well, he don’t want me, of course.”

Years ago, when Solo had been running between bullets on battlefields, Armitage had taken pleasure in sending him letters from country estates all over England. The young Lord Michaels, it seemed, was accounted one of the finest fencers in the land, sought after at house parties for his entertaining showmanship with a blade and his charming company. For the first time in their lives, since that day in the cane fields when Ben had picked up that old sword out of the dust, everyone thought Hux was the best.

“He asked for you,” Armitage said now.

Slowly, Ben curved his fingers around the carved wooden arms of his chair. A moment ago he had been enjoying this chair, thronelike and so ancient that it looked like it had lived in this pub since Creation. He had been enjoying the flavor of malt upon his tongue and the sweet laughter and plump thighs of Miss Annie Favor until she revealed her intention of having him scourged. He even liked the little medieval village of Duddingston despite the new threat of its vengeful vicar. He had been enjoying this entire holiday to Scotland with his cousin, upon which Huxley drank heavily to ease the grief of losing the man they had both loved, and he considered his next step in life.

Since burying his brother at sea, he had been at a standstill. He hadn’t the funds to found a fencing school. Every reputable salle in London had made him offers, but he could never live there. This little journey to Scotland had seemed the ideal diversion until he decided what to do next.

“Why me?” His fingers played about the wooden armrest. “Why not Faucher or Accosi? They are both in England.”

“Read wants an Englishman. You’re better than both of them anyway.”

“I am French and Jamaican.” Said Ben bitterly.

“And English too on your mother’s side. And you’re my cousin, the grandson of a baron, for pity’s sake,” Huxley added. “A drop is enough.”

Yet a drop of noble blood had not been enough six years ago, when he pledge for a gentlewoman’s hand. And now the Duke of Read wanted him. The irony of it would be sublime if it weren’t unwelcome.

“Had you intended to tell me the truth before we actually walked into the duke’s castle? Or did you plan to simply turn me over to the major-domo and hold your palm out for the commission before heading off to cards in the drawing room?”

“It ain’t my choice that you won’t let that blasted solicitor read Tor’s will. Must’ve left a fortune to us, the blackguard. I wager you’ll be through with teaching for life once you accept that money’s yours to use as you like.”

Not an option.

But he had swiftly discerned the essence of Huxley’s plan. “And while I am teaching the gentlemanly arts of foil and saber to this young branch of the noble tree of Read, you will be courting the pearl-like Miss Rose Edwards while residing in the castle of a wealthy duke.”

Armitage grinned, his face to no greater advantage than when he was pleased with himself. “Ideal accommodations for launching a campaign, what?”

“And what of her father’s conviction that you are a drunken, penurious Corinthian? Will that simply evaporate?”

“He likes me,” Armitage mumbled. “He just don’t know it yet.”

“‘Holiday in Scotland, cousin. Take a month or two to celebrate Tor’s rakehell life.’ Hm.”

“Well, if I could’ve done it the old-fashioned way and forced his hand, I would have! But I ain’t handsome enough to make the girls drop their drawers at the crook of a finger, like some fellows.” He gestured to Ben and then rolled his eyes. “Oh, stuff and nonsense.” Abruptly he brightened and tipped his glass forward. “You’ll see. No better patron than a duke.”

This was true. He wanted out of England. His own reputation and the patronage of a duke with foreign connections would ensure that wherever he founded a school it would be a success. To secure this exalted patronage, for a few months he must live in the last place he wished to be.

Huxley was wrong. Some girls did not drop their drawers for him at the crook of a finger. With some girls he had been too fool-besotted to even ask. Rather, with one girl. Only one girl. The girl whose house six years ago he would have given everything he had to gain entrance to. The house he had now been invited into as an employee. This would be a good moment to be drunk.

He lifted his hand to summon the tavern keeper. “If you intend to court a lady shortly, you had best sober up.”

“You’ll do it? Great gun, Benny! I knew you would.” The barkeep set a plate of mutton pie before Armitage. “You’ll see,” he said around a mouthful. “This’ll be just the thing you need to set you right. By God, it’ll set us both right. Tor would be proud.”

If he were alive now, Tor would split his sides.

How his brother had laughed at him six years ago and called him a fool—a fool for not getting what he had wanted before he knew who she was, and a fool for making another attempt a year later. But Torquil Solo had lived life without honor. A cheating, Machiavellian, woman-chasing slave smuggler, he had never missed an opportunity to celebrate the pleasures of life while manipulating it all to his advantage.

Benjamin could still hear his laughter when he’d told him about that ill-fated fortnight in Kent six years ago. Now he was gone, and with him the last person who knew.

Except her.

But she lived in London. So he told his cousin he would accept the post.

***********************

Castle Read

Home of the Duke of Read

Midlothian, Scotland

“I need a husband,” Lady Regina Read declared, tumbling into the velvety interior of her father’s carriage. “Immediately.”

“Well, this is an abrupt change of heart,” said Eliza Josephs from the opposite seat as the carriage drew away from the cloth mill.

“My heart has nothing to do with it, of course.” It hadn’t in years. Affection for three men Rey had aplenty: two now blissfully married, and the third so devoted to the secret government agency he headed that he hadn’t time for anything else. She loved these men as friends, as brothers. But only one man had ever stolen her heart—a man she could not have. And after the night she witnessed what men were capable of she vowed never to love one of them again.

She was neither fortunate nor wise in love. Now affection must be enough.

“Make haste, Rory,” she said to the coachman and pulled her cloak from about her as the door closed. “It will have to be the duke,” she directed at her companion, tugging her hair out of its heavy coils.

“The duke who is an abductor of maidens?” Forty years Rey’s senior, a widow, and an aficionado of fermented brews, Eliza tilted her frizzled head. “How adventuresome you are, dear girl.”

“That is all gossip and rumor.” Regina bound her hair into a tail at the nape of her neck. The countryside passed swiftly by. There were a few miles from the cloth mill to the castle. She still had time to snatch a ride before dinner.

Eliza proffered a pile of soft velvet. “You are depending upon your memories of Loch Tay when you were bairns.”

“I am.” She accepted the clothes eagerly. During her childhood at the castle she had worn skirts suited to riding astride and bodices and sleeves for shooting. Today, however, she had dressed demurely. A lady just up from London could not go ferreting out clues to a horrible mystery looking like a hoyden.

“Boys change when they become men,” Eliza said darkly.

“Not that much.” The boy she had known twenty years ago could not possibly have become a monster. “I must discover what happened to those girls.”

“Gossiping with mill workers will not accomplish that.” There was a tut-tut quality to her companion’s voice.

“But it already has! A man of low appearance ordered a dozen white robes from the mill not a sennight ago, to be delivered to Sir Lorian Snoke at the house he has just let in Edinburgh.” Her fingers worked at the buttons of the gown she had worn to take tea with the villagers. “A dozen robes, Eliza. And here is the astonishing detail: half of them were to be suitable for men, the other half for women.”

Eliza’s birdlike hands folded in her lap. “Sir Lorian Snoke needn’t intend the robes for a devil-worshipping society at which they sacrifice maidens, child,” she said primly. “He might intend to throw a masquerade.”

“We shall see.” She lifted her hips to tug the gown down her legs. “I must find a husband. Quickly.”

“You should have remained in London. Candidates dropped from the trees when you walked through the park.”

“When I left London I did not yet know I needed a husband, of course.”

“I cannot believe that you actually intend to marry Loch Tay in order to enter a secret society.”

“Well, I cannot enter it unmarried.”

“Your devotion to subterfuge is impressive,” Eliza said archly now. “I think you are enjoying this horrid mystery.”

“I do not find pleasure in tragedy.” A fortnight earlier she had held Cassandra Finch’s mother in her arms and felt her heaving sobs against her breast, and she had recognized that grief. She had wept like that when she was fourteen and her mother disappeared. She had not been able to save her mother. But if Cassandra Finch and Maggie Poultney were still alive, she would save them. And if memories of her mother weren’t sufficient, her own fresh scars would compel her to rescue innocent girls from danger at the hands of a villain who hid behind a polished veneer.

“I must remove to Edinburgh and begin investigating.” Only twelve miles distant from town, Castle Read might as well be twelve thousand.

Eliza’s lips pursed. “The Edinburgh police—”

“Have not done enough. I can.” For five years in London she had performed her role as the reclusive Scottish duke’s heiress with perfection: riding decorously, flirting subtly, gossiping cleverly, all for the sake of cozening information from others to help her fellow agents in the Resistance Club. She would do whatever she must now too, this time alone. Here, amidst rich green hills bathed in stripes of mist and sunshine, she was, after all, accustomed to solitude.

Shaking her head, Eliza assisted her into the wide skirt. “Your father expects you for tea. Your friends, Dr. Shaw and Libby arrive today.”

“And I am eager to see them. I promise not to be long.”

Eliza lowered her chin. “You are going there again, aren’t you?”

“Not all the way there.”

“This is not wise, Regina.”

“No one will see me, Eliza.”

“You should have at least brought a suitable shirt. This shift is insufficient to cover your bosom. You look a fright. An heiress should not go about the countryside as you do.”  
Rey laughed. “It warms me, darling, that you take more care in my appearance than in my safety.”

“Impertinent girl.”

“And yet for all of these years you have stayed with me,” she said with a grin. “There must be hope for me yet.” Leaning forward, she bussed her companion on the cheek. Then she threw open the carriage door. Rory had brought them along the road directly to the stable block. But even at a distance the impressive mass of Castle Read dwarfed all else. A solid medieval keep of golden brown limestone topped with a dozen pointed turrets of gray slate and fronted by a low forecourt wall, it both beckoned and warned. “Walcome,” it seemed to say, “but anly if ye be allies.”

It was a heathen place. No gardeners cut the lawn. No one touched the rose vines that had gone feral about the forecourt gate. No industrious clippers tamed the ivy that snaked up the fortress’s walls. She adored it. It was solid and strong and wild all at once, and she had missed it.

The carriage continued to the forecourt where Eliza would disembark, and Regina entered the stable. Her skin was too hot, as though it had sucked all the heat within her and threw it to the surface to battle the late-winter air. But inside the stable fashioned of ancient stone, her mind quieted. At the sound of her footsteps, her horse turned its head.  
“Good afternoon, Elfhame.” She stroked the mare’s milky brow, then saddled and bridled her.

A short canter brought her to the river and another thirty minutes to the apex of the hill from which she could glimpse the hulking pinkish tower of Haiknayes Castle, present home of Gabriel Adair, the Duke of Loch Tay.

The Maiden Kidnapper.

All over the countryside, at tea tables and in shops, gossip boiled: The enigmatic Duke of Loch Tay was the head of a secret society. A selective society to which only rich and wellborn married couples received invitations. A society dedicated to the Dark Arts. And in this society’s lair somewhere in Edinburgh, the practitioners of this evil religion sacrificed maidens.

The police had yet to solve the mysteries of the disappearances in September and December of Cassandra Finch and Maggie Poultney: unwed girls of marriageable age, only Maggie’s bloodied cloak discovered upon the bank of the loch near the Duke of Loch Tay’s Edinburgh residence, and marked with a six-pointed star that bore three symbols: a flame, a wave, and a mountain peak. The same unique star was carved into the lintel over the main portal of Haiknayes Castle.

Some whispered that during his years sailing the seas as captain in the Royal Navy, the mysterious Duke of Loch Tay had become a practitioner of native magicks, a worshipper of Satan, a fiend. The villagers that Regina had spoken with at the cloth mill that morning had called him Christsondy: the Devil.

But she would not find answers staring at his castle. She must meet the duke again and learn the truth of it from him.

Shadows cut swaths across the hills as she walked Elfhame home. She would tell her father that she intended to move to the house in Edinburgh for the spring. After allowing her to live with only Eliza in London for years, he would not deny her.

In the stable, she gave her mare into the stable hand’s care.

“They be some fine animals visitin’, my leddy. I’ll gladly volunteer to put that bay through his paces.”

“Have Dr. Shaw and Miss Shaw arrived already, Fingal?” She whipped off her hat and gloves. “Am I that late?”

“No’ the doctor, my leddy.” Fingal gestured along the stable. “These belong to the gentlemen visitors.”

“Gentlemen?” She moved toward the unfamiliar horses.

And her steps faltered.

The two animals in the stall did not belong to Dr. John Shaw or his daughter. Beside a pretty chestnut stood a bay with such a rich brown coat that in the shadows it looked nearly black. It was gorgeous, with long legs and a powerful neck, ears pointed forward, and intelligent eyes watching her. She recognized it. Its beauty and breeding made it unique. And she recognized its tack. Its bridle of supple leather was surmounted by a brow band imprinted with two black, crossed swords. The saddle was of finely tooled leather, with holsters for the scabbards of two swords sewn carefully onto either side so that the weapons would not disturb the animal’s gait.

She knew this animal because eight months earlier she had spent three silent hours tucked into the corner of a public stable in London watching it—watching, and waiting for its master to return and claim it. When he had, he had settled into that saddle with the ease and grace of a warrior.

Cheeks hot and hands unsteady, she swept the train of her riding skirt into the crook of her arm and left the stable. The castle forecourt was empty, but two dozen windows stared down at her like eyes that seemed as shocked as her frantic pulse. She crossed the threshold and pretended not to hold her breath. In the hall, her father’s voice came down from the balustrade, quiet and firm, stone wrapped in felt.

“Castle Read was built in the early fourteenth century as a fortress, with little concern for comfort. Each of my predecessors made additions to it. There are plenty of guest rooms now. I shall have my housekeeper make up the finest for you, my lord.”

“Terribly decent of you to take me in uninvited.” A man’s voice, light, jaunty. “I’m much obliged.”

Not . . . not him.

Air seeped back into Rey’s lungs.

Then deserted her entirely.

Upon the stairs beyond the chandelier descended two feet encased in knee-high boots the color of earth. Two legs clad in leather breeches that shaped the muscle like carved stone. Two hands, ungloved, strength apparent in the sinews. Two shoulders to which she had once clung like sunshine to a stained-glass window. And one long, steel blade upon which the remaining light of day seemed to gather.

Then his eyes—eyes that captured a hundred ancient incantations and turned them into magic, that had once thrust her world upside down. Now he turned them upon her. How the touch of a man’s gaze could seize everything inside her and lock it into paralysis, she had never understood. Certainly not then. And not now.

She stared.

Behind him, her father and the other man appeared on the stairs.

“There is my daughter now. Regina, I required your presence here for tea. But I see you have been riding.”

“I have been to the ridge to see Haiknayes.” She hardly knew how she spoke.

“I see.” Displeasure sat upon his tongue like a cockerel. “Regina, I present to you Lord Michaels and Mr. Solo. Perhaps you and his lordship have crossed paths in London.”

They had not. She had intentionally avoided him.

She curtsied. “My lord.”

A dimple dented Lord Michaels’s cheek as he bent at the waist. He was an attractive man, nattily dressed in a nip-waist coat and shiny Hessians, as though he weren’t now in the Scottish countryside but paying morning calls in London.

“Truly delighted, my lady. I hope you don’t mind that I have imposed myself on your hospitality.”

“Of course not.”

“Do tell us,” he said, “how was your viewing of Haiknayes Castle?”

“From a distance only. Are you acquainted with it?”

“Rather, with the duke himself. In fact, I had reason to pay a call on him at the Christmas holidays only a few months ago, at Port Leith.”

During the Christmas holidays Maggie Poultney had gone missing.

“Did you?” she said.

“Yes, indeed. He’s a capital fellow.” But his smile faded.

Then she must turn her gaze to him.

Hand resting on the guard of his sword, he bowed. “Good day, ma’am.”

Hot brandy. The same. She had remembered it well. He had changed little. Six years ago his face had been perfect to her, the features strong and handsome. Now a slender scar ran the length of its right side, making a slash in his cheek along the line of short, neat whiskers, to his jaw.

She could not curtsy. The velvet train lodged in her elbow felt weighed in stone and her legs were foolishly unsteady. Quite acutely she felt now cool air upon the skin of her neck where she should have donned a shirt. But he did not look at her neck. He looked into her eyes, as he had all those years ago. She had never met a man before or since who looked at her like Benjamin Archibald Solo did, as though he cared only for what he found in her gaze.

She dragged her attention to Lord Michaels. “What brings you to Scotland so soon again, my lord?”

“Truth be told, I am hanging on to my cousin’s coattails.”

“I have engaged Mr. Solo as a fencing instructor,” her father said.

“My cousin wields a dashed clever blade.” Lord Michaels pointed a smile at the man Rey had spent six years not trying very hard to forget.

“But you know how to fence, Father.” Every word crawled over the next with awkward haste.

“The lessons are not for me,” he said without pleasure in his eyes.

“Oh.” She felt foolish, her cheeks a flaming apple orchard and her tongue useless. Gone was the London belle who flirted with ease. Gone, the lady of fashion sought after by hostesses from Mayfair to Kensington. Two minutes beneath the gaze of Benjamin Archibald Solo, and she was again an impetuous girl struggling to steady her frantic pulse. It didn’t help that her father had not warned her of this. But he would have no reason to think she needed warning. No one but Eliza had ever known—no one except Jack, and Jack was dead.

“I see,” she said. “I am sorry for your trouble, Mr. Solo. My nephew was visiting us here, but he departed a sennight ago. Your pupil has already returned to his parents’ home.”

“I did not engage Mr. Solo to teach young James,” her father said. “He will teach you, Regina.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @AdamDriverLatam
> 
> I hope you're not mad at me or Ben for the other girl, but she will play a part later on.  
> Also, I didn't named Ben's bro Kylo cause he's dead and I didn't want to trigger or hurt anyone's feelings. Most of us are still grieving and trying to heal.  
> Thanks to my dear beta who provided books and vocab for the old Scottish language or laguage mannerisms.


	3. The Bribe

Ben turned from the beauty whom he had not thought, hoped, or wished to ever see again to the Duke of Read. 

“I beg your pardon?”

But the duke’s attention was still on his daughter.

“Me, Father?” she said. “But, whatever for?”

“Your interest in swords has not gone unnoticed by me, Rey.”

“My interest?”

The duke peered down his patrician nose. “Did you imagine that each time you sent another package here from London, I simply handed them over to the service without taking note?” 

With a gesture he indicated the walls of the hall in which they now stood. From floor to ceiling, weapons adorned the wood paneling, most of them sabers and smallswords, and a number of very old and fine rapiers, but also daggers, knives, bayonets, and bows, as well as other tools of war. Upon entering the castle an hour earlier and seeing this collection, Ben had finally made sense of the duke’s wish to hire an expert to teach a mere boy. Clearly the duke was an enthusiast. Apparently not only the duke.

“But, ’tis merely a collector’s curiosity, Father,” she said, the soft music of Scots slipping over her tongue. Years ago, that lilt had only appeared in her voice when— When he touched her.

Now her cheeks were not pink as then, but ivory.

“I never thought of learning to use them,” she said.

“Now you may,” the duke said.

“I knew nothing of this,” Ben said. 

As he had known nothing of her presence here. For five years she had lived in London exclusively, which had been sufficient reason for him to make his residence anywhere else—Bristol, Plymouth, Dover—wherever he would not encounter her by accident. He had been wise to do so. She was astonishingly beautiful now, more so than he had imagined she would someday become, with brown lucious hair, ripe lips, and those same vibrant eyes. The softness of youth had fled from her, revealing beauty sculpted by a master.

Years ago she had fidgeted, as though she had not known how to rest in her own skin. And her eyes had been everywhere on him at once. She had looked at him then as though she stood before a banquet, famished, yet did not know how to eat. That gaze, both hungry and confused, had turned him inside out. Now her gaze was aloof as it came to him.

“You did not?” she said.

“No.” He turned to his cousin. “Did you?”

“Not I! Lord Blackwood’s letter said you were to teach his grace’s ward."

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Solo,” the duke said with a cool absence of sincerity. “My nephew must have misunderstood my instructions.”

“Well, now that we all have the true story,” Armitage said cheerily, “it sounds like a capital plan. What say you, my lady?” 

“I won’t do it,” Ben said.

“You won’t?” Her eyes snapped wide. “Do you doubt that I am able to learn the sword?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” she demanded as she took a step toward him, her chin tipping upward. A stray wisp of brown falling over her brow marred the perfection, and she was breathtaking. “Do you think women incapable of skill and strength?”

“I think women capable of most anything they wish.”

“But then—”

“I think ladies capable of skill with flirtation and strength in demanding that their wishes be met.”

Her lips hardened. Even so they were beautiful and he still remembered how soft they had grown beneath his.

“Do you intend to insult me?” she said.

“If you find insult in my words, I advise you to consult your guilty conscience.”

Her mouth shut abruptly. And, by God, it pained him—irrational, idiotic—it pained him to see her chastened, even by his own words. But this was no innocent before him now, with seeking eyes and unpracticed touch. This was a stunning woman who by all accounts made men the length of Britain slaver after her while she gave none of them satisfaction.

“If you truly wish instruction,” he said, “I will write to an acquaintance of mine in London who will, I am certain, be happy to teach the martial arts to the daughter of a duke. He would consider it a coup. I would not. Shall I contact him on your behalf?”

“I already know the other martial arts. I shoot like a man with both bow and pistol. Can you believe that?”

Swiftly he inspected the set of her shoulders, her arms that were more toned than rounded, her solid stance.

She was staring at him as though he had undressed her—here, before her father and his cousin.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“I am gratified by your assessment,” she said like the softest cream sliding over his skin. And then she curtsied.

For the first time in months he actually wanted to smile. “Do you wrestle too? And box?”

“I have struck a man’s face with my fist. Does that count?” Laughter glimmered in her eyes.

“I should think so. What did he do?”

“Before or after I struck him?”

The pleasure in Ben’s chest died.

“Why not, cousin?” Huxley said. “If his lordship is for it, and Lady Regina likes the idea, I think it fitting enough, especially now that we’re already here.”

Armitage only thought of the bald opportunity, and he would happily prostitute anyone else to serve his desires. Benjamin could not oblige him. He backed away from the woman who had, six years ago, taught him a lesson he had not wanted to learn.

“I will write to my friend in London,” he said to the duke. “I apologize for the misunderstanding. I will depart immediately.”

“Mr. Solo,” the duke said, “I should like your company for dinner tonight. As the sun is setting and frost is expected, travel is not advisable. You must remain the night at least.”

“Yes, Mr. Solo.” Her bewitching mouth twitched. “Do remain the night.”

After seeing that his horse had been watered and fed, and combing the tangles from Falcon’s mane while a barn cat peered at him from atop a stall door, Ben returned to the castle. A servant in the hall gave him a swift perusal, frowned, and snatched a brush from a brass bucket.

“Place your foot upon this, sir.” He gestured impatiently toward a chair. He had small black eyes and a thin disapproval about his face.

Ben glanced at his muddy boots. “I can clean my own shoes.”

“Foot on the chair, sir. Now.”

He did as bidden and watched the fellow buff the leather to a shine. “I am obliged, friend. What is your name?”

“Mr. Viking.” The servant straightened. “And I am not your friend. I am only ashamed that you would enter his grace’s private chambers looking like an oaf.”

“His private chambers?”

“You are expected immediately. Come.”

Benjamin followed, wondering if Scottish dukes had the power to hurl a man into a dungeon for verbally abusing their daughters. Not his finest moment. But he was no one’s servant, most especially not hers. Stairs rose up a tight, round tower, and he ducked his head to pass through the doorway to the second story and into an antechamber decorated with mammoth paintings of a hunt. Towering over his dogs and mounted upon his steed like a general, the hunter wore a crimson coat with epaulettes. The eyes of the mighty stag he pursued showed white with terror.

Viking led him into a chamber of dark brocaded burgundy, polished wood, and the scent of foreign spices—cardamom, frankincense. A half dozen dogs reclined about the floor. Comfortably lit and warm, the room boasted two chairs by a hearth and a table laid with a chessboard. A dog rose and came to Ben, sniffing the stable on his boots and breeches. The duke did not rise. Seated before the chessboard, he studied Benjamin with eyes like his daughter’s, curious and intelligent. A man of six decades, with a hard mouth, he had exchanged his coat for a dressing gown threaded with gold.

“Do you play, Mr. Solo?”

“I do.”

With the tips of two fingers inclined toward the opposite chair, the Duke of Read invited him to a game. Ben sat. Whether Read wished to shame him by beating him or to cajole him by letting him win mattered little. To the nobility, a game was a game.

The duke led with a knight. “I understand that you returned to the stable to see to your horse. How did you find it?”

Aha.This was the moment Read would inform him that his bed for the night had been transferred to a stall there. “Exceptional.” He moved a pawn into play.

The duke took up a rook. “I have recently had the building renovated. It was high time. The block was erected in fifteen twenty-eight, more than a century after the construction of the castle itself.”

Now he was meant to be awed by the family’s ancient lineage. He shifted a knight across the board. “Your coachman told me that you breed horses.”

“Hunters. Do you hunt?”

He allowed himself a smile. “No.”

“Your horse is an extraordinarily fine animal, and still young enough to be trained to it. From whom did you purchase it?”

“It was a gift.”

The duke lifted a bishop. “From a patron?”

“From a friend who believed he owed a debt of gratitude to me.”

“What had you done for your friend, Mr. Solo?”

He slid a pawn toward the duke’s queen. “I taught him how to defend himself against those who wished him ill.”

“I see.” The duke moved his queen aside. “You were hard on my daughter earlier. You are skeptical of her potential as a student.”

“I am skeptical of her application to the task.”

Read’s hand paused over the board. “My daughter does not tease, Mr. Solo.”

Clearly the duke did not know his daughter well. “I don’t take your meaning.”

“If she wishes to learn to fence, she will put her best effort toward it. She is an extraordinarily adept student with a formidable tenacity.” Read now held his gaze.

“With all due respect, sir, you cannot intimidate me into accepting this post.”

A serving man entered with trays of covered silver dishes and arranged them beside the chessboard. The duke dismissed him. Ignoring the food, he took up a crystal carafe.

“Wine?” He poured without waiting for Ben’s response. “So you will teach her.”

“I have no intention of doing so.”

“Delay your departure for a day or two. A sennight. Come to know my daughter’s character before making a decision.”

He already knew her character as well as he could bear.

“There are other teachers.”

“But none better, I understand. Nevertheless, I found your history perplexing. Why is that, Mr. Solo?”

“I suspect you already know.”

“For nearly two years you went by another name in England, your own, but not Solo. I know the reason.” The duke set his elbows on the chair arms and made a steeple of his long fingers. “I offer you my condolences on the loss of your brother.”

“Thank you.” Ben waited for the blow.

“I am aware of certain ventures of his that, were they to be carefully examined, might not bear the full scrutiny of the law.”

“I haven’t any knowledge of my brother’s business.”

“It seems, however, that Lord Michaels invested in several of your brother’s ventures, and benefitted from those investments. It would be unfortunate if they were revealed as not entirely legitimate. That sort of thing can ruin a man. A shame. Such a pleasant young man, your cousin. But alas, the young are prone to make careless mistakes.”

Ben stood up.

The duke unfolded from his chair and went across the room. A sword case rested atop a chest. Inlaid with wood fashioned in the shapes of tiny bees, the box itself was valuable: Italian, of the house of Barberini. The duke set the box on the table and opened the latch. Upon a bed of dark velvet glimmered a long, silver rapier. He withdrew it.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful, Mr. Solo?”

Gleaming in the candlelight, it was lithe in design, despite the length of the blade preferred by men of centuries past.

Ben nodded. “No. But beauty is only part of a sword’s allure.”

The duke offered it to him. Its balance was perfect, the blade ideally weighted to the hilt. He wrapped his palm around the grip. It fit his hand as though fashioned for him.

“What do you think of it?” Read said.

“It is magnificent.”

“My daughter purchased it from an Arab trader in Dover. Why she was in Dover, I haven’t the least notion, except perhaps to add this to her collection. And yet I don’t believe she even removed it from the case before sending it to me. With each weapon she sends, she includes the same letter: Father, Here is a gift for you. Do with it what you will.” Standing beside the chessboard, he reached down and absently moved a piece. “I have never been particularly clever with a blade, Mr. Solo, but I do like to look at them. So I have put them about the house, as you have seen. But this one . . . this is special.” He settled again in his chair, a king upon his throne. “I would like you to have it.”

Ben returned the rapier to its case. “I am an honest man, sir. I don’t care for bribes, nor for those who offer them to me.”

“You refuse to address me as I think you know you ought.” Read’s eyes were sharp. “I don’t care for that.”

“It must be my French blood. Revolutionaries, all of us, you know.” Ben glanced at the chessboard. “Thank you for the game.” He went to the door.

“This sword is not a bribe,” the duke said behind him. “It is a gift. A man would be a great fool, Mr. Solo, to hide such a precious treasure away in a remote castle when the ideal candidate for it stands before him. I am well aware of your skill and the use you have put it to. It is impressive, to say the least.”

He laughed. “I am not a girl to have my head turned by flattery, nor a child to be chastised . . . Your Grace,” he added with a smile.

“Of course not. Still, I trust you will accept this. Putting it in good hands will go some way toward assuaging my disappointment over your refusal to instruct my daughter. Mr. Davis,” he called and the butler opened the door to the antechamber. “Convey that sword case to Mr. Solo’s room.”

The man carried it past Ben and departed.

“You needn’t keep it,” Read said. “Only consider it, if you will.”

“Good night.” Benjamin left the room, crossed the antechamber and reached for the door handle. The panel swung open and abruptly she was before him, her cheeks flushed and lips parted. She had changed her hair and wore jewels about her bared neck now. The lamplight set them aglitter, like the candid brown of her eyes. She practically glowed.  
She was an heiress, a woman of beauty and wealth and rank who had in her youth engaged in a careless flirtation with an idiotically susceptible young man. She was no grand villain. No matter that he’d spent years avoiding this moment, now he saw only the soft, quick surprise of that girl with whom he had spent one forbidden fortnight, the girl he had not for one day in six years forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again thanks to my beta and dear husband!!!


	4. Unpredictable & Imprevious

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my Beta!!

Her chin tilted up. “Did he read you a setdown?”

“For refusing to teach you?”

“For insulting me.”

Ben had to smile. “Not exactly.”

Her gaze slipped over his face slowly, settling upon his mouth.

“My father is . . .” Delicate nostrils flared. “Unpredictable.”

“To my advantage in this instance, it seems.”

“That is an impressive scar. How did you come by it?”

Unpredictable.“By the tip of a blade.”

She met his regard again. “Then it seems you are not the invincible warrior my father believes you to be.”

“Ah, but you mistake it. A man’s invincibility is not measured by the impenetrability of his skin, rather, by the imperviousness of his heart.” He bowed. “Good night.”

He passed by her so close that Rey felt the brush of his sleeve against her bare arm. Then he was through the door and gone, leaving her unbalanced as he had earlier. Impervious. If he could claim imperviousness, so could she. Willing away her nerves, she knocked on the door to her father’s rooms.

“Come,” he said from within. With a glass of wine cupped in his palm, he was seated before his chessboard.

“Why have you done this, Father?”

“Mr. Solo departed without making his next move. I would have you finish his game, but I like to see how a man plays to the end. I must await his return.”

“His return? But . . . I thought he was leaving.”

“I believe he intends to stay on for a few days. He cannot be comfortable departing in the middle of a game, after all.”

She must know if he had told her father the truth: that they were not strangers. But she could not ask without revealing it. And now her father was playing his favorite sort of game, the sort that left her confused and frustrated.

“I should like an answer.”

Finally he raised his eyes to her. “I thought it would please you.”

She gripped the back of the chair his opponent had vacated. “If I wanted to learn to fence, I would have hired a fencing master in London.”

“Have a seat, if you will.”

“Why?”

“Because I am your father and still in command of your future.”

She lowered herself into the chair. From habit, her eyes studied the arrangement of pieces. Every conversation of any significance with him had taken place over this chessboard. He was a man of quiet pursuits, and since her mother had died he had changed very little about how he lived: he remained in this castle most of the year, eschewing his houses in Edinburgh and London which his wife had disliked, and he still allowed his only child to go on in most any manner she wished with only the companionship of an elderly widow.

“I would like to remove to Edinburgh, Father. I have instructed the butler to see to hiring servants and preparing the house. I intend to go with Eliza within the month.”

“That suits my plans well,” he said.

“I—I am glad to know it,” she said in some surprise.

“Regina, you will marry before your birthday.”

“Before my birthday? In five weeks? I—”

“Loch Tay has made his interest clear to me, and I think him an ideal candidate. His holdings are large and productive in barley, wheat, and wool, and his mercantile activities ensure additional income.”

Loch Tay.“I—”

“Your cousin has informed me that Alvamoor suits his family, and that he does not intend to move here when I am gone and he ascends to the dukedom. Haiknayes is close enough so that when that day arrives you can remain chatelaine of this castle on your cousin’s behalf. In this way, the breeding herd needn’t be sold unless you and Blackwood agree to it.”

“But you are in good health, are you not?”

“Dr. Shaw assures me that my health is excellent.”

“Then I don’t understand why—”

“Loch Tay will be in Edinburgh next month, allowing a fortnight for the two of you to become reacquainted and for the banns to be read before your birthday.”

“Father.” She grappled for words. Here was what she wanted, what she had hoped. “This is unexpected.”

“Since your fiance's death, I have allowed you virtual autonomy. In the five years since your mourning ended, you have refused offers from a number of suitors who applied to me and, as I understand it from Mrs. Josephs, directly to you as well.”

“But,”

“I have long known that you and he never intended to wed. He suggested it to me more than once.”

“He did?” This struck her painfully. She had trusted him never to tell anyone that they had agreed not to wed, that their extended courtship was a sham to allow them each to pursue their own interests in London. “I see,” she said.

“I have not pressed you to wed because none of your suitors satisfied my wishes for you.”

“The Duke of Loch Tay does?”

“Yes. More importantly, time has run out. According to the terms of your mother’s dowry, on your twenty-fifth birthday your portion from it will be folded into any marriage contract you enter into. I would prefer that this money remain in your control. If you marry after your birthday next month, along with your dowry of twenty-five thousand pounds, this money will also become your husband’s.”

“My mother’s dowry?” This was news indeed. “How much money?”

“Fifty thousand pounds. Not a trifling amount.”

“Fifty thousand pounds? But that is a fortune. Why didn’t you tell me this before? Years ago?”

“After Jack’s death I had no desire to see you marry in haste merely in order to collect that money.”

“You wound me, Father. I would not have done so.”

“Perhaps. But that concern is now moot. You must marry before your birthday. Loch Tay will do.” He stood and his dogs lifted their heads from their paws. “When he arrives in Edinburgh he will inform me. Until then, I have a number of matters to attend to here. I will advise Mrs. Josephs that she should see to your trousseau. You will marry from the house in town.” He snapped his fingers and six sleek spaniels followed him through the door to his dressing room, tails wagging.

Rey stared at the chessboard, the pieces carved in the East Indies from marble. The game was advanced, with white and black perfectly matched, neither at an advantage yet. Mr. Solo, it seemed, could hold his own against a chess master. Perhaps an impervious heart helped him with that.

She stroked a fingertip along the white knight’s mane. With this set, her father had taught her to play the game, carefully instructing her how to maneuver and plan tactics and outflank. He had shown her that to gain a king a player must sometimes sacrifice other valuable pieces, and that she must always anticipate her opponent’s guile. Yet, six months ago, she had not heeded those lessons. She had trusted a man she thought was a friend only to discover that he was not.

If her father knew how Walker Styles had played her for a fool, he would despise her.

She did not understand her father. She never had. She had never asked him for anything, but he had always been generous. Generous and untouchable, when she would have given every gown, horse, and London luxury for a moment of his affection.

Now he intended her to wed Gabriel Adair, the duke everyone believed to be a monster. And yet hiring a master to teach her fencing was even more surprising. She would use it to her advantage. If the Duke of Loch Tay was the Devil rumor claimed, her father was giving her precisely what she needed to learn to defend herself.

Invincible.Six months ago, she had been far from invincible. Now she could become so. It seemed only fitting that Benjamin Archibald Solo would be her teacher, the man who had misled a naïve girl into believing that men could be trusted.

Bracing two fingertips against the corner of the board, with a single thrust of her arm, she pushed. The board jerked to the edge of the table, teetered, and fell, scattering marble and teak across the floor. She stood up and left the room.

\-----------------------------------------

“Lady Regina is positively stunning.” Armitage was sprawled in a chair in Ben’s bedchamber.

On the ground floor, it was a sizeable room with arched ceilings painted white and a massive recessed fireplace that must have once been a kitchen hearth. Narrow slits cut through the thick outer wall proved the room’s former utility; he could aim a rifle or crossbow directly through any one of them.

“Stunning, I say,” his cousin repeated.

Stunning. Confident. Brazen. Direct. Breathtaking. She halted his lungs and turned his insides out with the briefest caress of her gaze. Still.

“Is she?” he mumbled.

“Good Lord, yes. Are you blind?”

He wished he were. Even so, the music of her voice would plague him to distraction.

“And what a delightful dinner companion! It’s a shame the duke entrapped you. Mrs. Josephs is an amusing conversationalist too. And Dr. Shaw, Read’s bosom bow, as I understand it. His daughter dined with us as well. Fifteen. Bookish. They’ve come for a lengthy visit. Shaw is a good enough fellow. Too taciturn for my tastes, of course. But Lady Regina ensured an entertaining evening all around. Why, she’s been in Scotland for nearly two months yet knows all about what everybody’s doing in London this very week.”

“Gossip?”

“’Pon my word, she never uttered a salacious phrase. Mostly praise of this fellow’s new high steppers and that lady’s musicale. You know the sort of thing.”

Huxley always spoke to him like this, as though he fluttered about from clubs to drawing rooms every day too. A man of good nature and little thought, Armitage had never entirely understood the difference between his life and his cousins’. Throughout their childhood Georges Banneret, the late Lord Michael’s steward in Jamaica and the man who taught them the sword, treated them all as equals. It had made a permanent mark on the baron’s heir; Armitage was thoroughly egalitarian in spirit and entirely oblivious to his own actual privilege.

“Both Shaw and his daughter dote on her,” Huxley continued. “The servants, too. She’s a favorite here, as she’s always been in London. How else would she have been able to go around for years without a wedding ring?”

Perhaps by giving everyone she encountered the intimate perusal she had offered him in the duke’s antechamber, and instantly rendering them senseless too. He scraped a hand over his face, but with his eyes closed he still saw her.

“If my heart weren’t already lost to a pearl,” Armitage said, “I would make a play for that diamond. Read likes me. I had a tasty glass of claret with him before he sequestered you for dinner. And he’s a civilized man, not a screwy Methodist like Edwards. Rich as Croesus, too. Come to think of it, Lady Regina’s fiancé, Jack Doreé, was an East India Company man. Was her fiancé. He fell in disgrace some time ago, nobody knows in what manner. All we know is that he ran off just before his marriage to Lady Regina. It was suspected that he had left the young Lady Read for a much prettier girl. But in my opinion, no girl is. Except for my Rose, of course”

Benjamin didn’t usually mind Armitage’s ramblings. Tonight he did.

“Peculiar . . .” Huxley mused, “Doreé passing up a beautiful heiress for another girl, especially after a betrothal of years. I wonder which of them held the thing up for so long? Some time after his disappearance, Jack perished. It was rumored that he took his own life. Did you know?”

“I believe I had heard something of it.” This was unendurable.

“They say Lady Regina was devoted to her betrothed.”

“Is that what they say?” He tugged at his neck cloth. The room was too hot. He looked to the hearth where the fire was barely embers.

Armitage scrunched up his brow. “Jack’s brothers inherited all the properties and the money of course. Too bad none of them was able to inherit Lady Read. Though I must admit I would never accept my brother’s betrothed as my own”

Ben stood up and went to the sword case. “You don’t have a brother.” He opened the case.

“It cuts me to the heart to hear you deny me so,” Huxley said dramatically and came to his side. “What’s this?”

“Read gave it to me.”

“As payment? Good God, cousin, I didn’t realize you were so expensive.”

“As a gift.”

Armitage took it up, running his fingertip half the length of the blade and around the tip. “This is a fine piece. Dull as a butter knife, though.”

To keep a blade of this caliber in such an impotent condition was a crime.

“Tomorrow I will find a smithy and see what can be done with it.”

Armitage’s head came up. “You’ve accepted the post, after all?” He grinned. “Great g—”

“I haven’t.”

“Damn it, Benjamin.” He raised the sword between them. “I would use this on you if I thought it could cut through a jelly.”

“I dare you to try.”

“You cur.” The sword drooped downward, mimicking Huxley’s posture. “She invited me to Edinburgh. But the house there isn’t ready yet. Repainting and furnishing and what not. The move won’t happen for some weeks, I imagine.”

“She?”

“Lady Regina.” He returned to the chair and slouched down into it, fondling the sword in the manner of a boy with a toy he had already tired of. “Haven’t you been listening? She’s the veriest darling. And she’s a brilliant hostess. She’ll entertain everybody who’s anybody, politicians, churchmen, precisely the prosy sort of dullards Edwards likes. He couldn’t possibly refuse me then.”

“Lady Regina invited you to reside in her house in Edinburgh? With her?”

“And her father and Mrs. Josephs. And Dr. Shaw and Miss Shaw, I believe. She said we’ll have a merry time of it.” He sent a narrow frown across the room. “Don’t tell me you disapprove? What, have you reformed since that preacher’s daughter put one over on you the other day?”

“I have no idea of what you are accusing me.”

“Never believe those jealous old biddies in London, about that arrangement she had with Doreé. It’s all nonsense. She’s far too fine a woman for those sorts of games. I don’t care what you’ve heard—”

“I have heard no gossip about her, no more than you yourself have told me.”

“Then why the dark brow? What’s to prevent me from taking advantage of a beautiful heiress’s generous invitation to put up at her house for a bit?”

Nothing except his wish to protect Huxley from the unhappy fate she was entirely capable of offering to a man heedless enough to court it.

“When I depart tomorrow,” he said, “take a room at a hotel in Edinburgh.”

“I’ve made it clear to everybody here that I’m bound to your side. It’s my dratted excuse for coming along. If you don’t stay, I cannot.”

“What of the Duke of Loch Tay? You said earlier that you called on him in Edinburgh at Christmastime.”

“He’s up north at present,” Armitage grumbled, “at his principal estate.” He jolted from the chair, tossed the sword into its case, and went to the door. Pausing there, with an unusually grave face he said, “I am in love with an exceptional girl, Ben, and I want to make her mine. I don’t guess you know what that feels like, or what it’s like to be thwarted in it. But I’m asking you to take pity on a fellow and help me.”

He went out, leaving Ben with a sword worth hundreds of pounds and an ache in his gut.


	5. A Lesson ... Of Sorts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some tags have been updated!! I hope you enjoy!!

In a blacksmith’s shop not a mile from the castle, the smith examined the rapier and then produced a small stone the color of sunset. The stone was warm and fine, perfect for the sword.

“I’ll take no payment for it, sir. Leddy Regina sent word that I was to aid ye with whatever ye wished. I’m happy to do a good turn for her.”

Ben tucked the whetstone into his pocket and returned to the castle along a road bordering the vast wood flanking the pastures and hills of the estate. A wall ran the length of the forest, breaking to dip into the estate grounds beyond where one-time formal gardens now grew wild. Walking Paid along a path at the tree line, he saw her.

Facing at an angle away from the wood, with the breeze pressing her skirts around her legs, which were braced slightly apart, she lifted a long bow with an arm as straight as her spine, nocked the arrow, and shot. With a thwack that sounded across the lawn, it pierced the target dead center.

Without pause, she reached for another arrow, settled it against the nocking point, drew her arm back smoothly, and let it fly. It embedded flush with the first.  
A third time she fit an arrow to the bow and pulled the taut string back with the ease with which most women unfurled a fan.

“Ten pounds says you cannot split them,” he called across the grass.

She swung around toward him, released the string, and a breeze brushed his cheek before the arrow sank into a tree trunk behind him.

“Goodness me,” she said, lowering the bow. “I missed the target. And I so wanted a new bonnet. Ah well, I will continue practicing and then I might win that ten pounds. But will you offer the wager again?”

He pressed his mount forward. “Your aim was off just then by at least two inches.”

“I thought you might like a matching set.” She wore a leather hand protector and her gown was plain and fitted snugly to her upper body and arms. Tall enough and lithe, with humble breasts and straight shoulders, she had a beautiful form. He wondered how many men had seen her dressed like this—revealing her shape so bluntly, so decadently—and if she intended Huxley to see her now.

“Thank you, but I will pass,” he said.

“But men with scars are so mysterious.” She was smiling—barely.

“The more scars, the more mysterious?”

“Naturally.”

“Then I prefer less mystery. And a bit less levity about it too.”

She turned again toward the target, lifted the bow, and took up another arrow.

“If you cannot make light of injury, Mr. Solo, perhaps you should pursue a different profession.” She let the arrow fly. It impacted the target’s outer ring.

“Lost your concentration, have you?” he said.

Swiftly she nocked another arrow and shot. The arrow joined its two mates in the bull’s-eye.

“Apparently not,” she said, and hoisted the bow again. “I thought you were leaving.”

“Shortly.”

The bowstring twanged and the arrow soared upon a wobbly trajectory to the target. It dove into the straw a hair’s breadth above the other four.

“I see that your boast about shooting was justified,” he said as she took up the empty quiver and walked toward the target. He urged Paid forward. “What is your range with a pistol?”

“Fifteen yards with perfect accuracy. At twenty yards, one in two.”

“Then given my aversion to acquiring more scars, I am glad to have encountered you with the bow.”

He reached the target before her, dismounted, and pulled the arrows from the fabric. When she approached, she accepted them and dropped them into the quiver.

“I did not actually intend to hit you.” She slung the strap of the quiver over her shoulder, and turned in the direction of the stable. “If I had intended to, I would have.”

“I have no doubt.” Drawing his horse by the reins, he followed her, enjoying the vision of the curve of her hips and her gait that remained steady even over knobby grass. From beneath a brimmed straw hat her hair lay in a long, thick plait down her back. She carried the bow at her side like she’d been doing so since it was taller than she.

“How do you come to be such a fine shot?” he asked.

“For nineteen years I had little to do but amuse myself on this estate. Needlework, books, and the pianoforte could not fill all the hours. And I was . . . restless. When I discovered shooting, I liked it. My father’s huntsman and my cousin gave me instruction.” Before the stable door she pivoted to him. “Why won’t you?” Color stood upon her cheeks and her lips were a lush garden of temptation, but the hat brim cast the top of her face in shadow.

“Remove your hat,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to see your eyes clearly.”

“My eyes?”

“Eyes are windows onto character. If you intend to fight a man, you must first look him in the eye.”

She set down the bow and untied the ribbon beneath her chin, then drew off the hat. “I am not a man, of course, and I do not intend to fight you.”

“The moment you take up a sword, you invite combat.” He walked toward her. Her hair was damp against her brow, wisps escaping the bindings and caressing her cheeks.  
“When you shoot,” he said, “you do so at a distance. There is safety in that distance. Between you and your opponent might be obstacles behind which you can hide. Or your enemy might find himself without ammunition. Arrows and bullets are finite.” He dropped his horse’s reins and went the remainder of the distance separating them. “When you fight a man with a blade, you haven’t the advantage of remaining aloof.”

Her eyes were steady upon him. “Aloof?”

“From physical contact. You can be an expert marksman with bow or firearm and never come within arm’s reach of your target.” He halted before her, close enough to see the dilation of her pupils, the depths of ebony within the brilliant brown. “When you fight with a sword you feel your opponent’s strength and you discern his skill in your own body. You experience him not only with your eyes and ears, but also in your flesh.”

She was breathing quickly but trying to hide it.

He snapped the brim of her hat from her fingers and tossed it on the ground. “Show me your hands.”

This time she did so without question, turning them face up between them. No fool to show him the backs, she offered him the palms, the seat of her power. But he had long since known she was not a fool. That award went to him.

“Remove the glove.”

She untied the protective leather from her left hand and let it fall beside her hat.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“The hands of a woman who hasn’t done a day’s labor in her life.” He met her gaze. As it widened, he moved around her and into the stable, his horse trailing him inside.

“Of course I haven’t,” she said.

“An hour with a sword in your hand,” he said, leading Paid into a stall, “and you would not be able to feel your arm for a week, except the pain.” He slipped a halter over the animal’s head and released the bit from its mouth. Hanging the bridle on a peg, he turned to her.

She stood at the threshold of the stall. “I don’t suppose the children you teach begin with calluses on their palms.”

He went to the door. “I don’t teach children.”

She arched a brow. “We are particular in our students, are we?”

“We are very good at what we do and needn’t take on students who do not suit us.”

Bow in hand again, with the full quiver of arrows slung against her back, she blocked the stall door.

“I don’t want to learn how to fence. My father’s idea is foolishness.” Frustration carved lines in her brow. This close her scent of winter roses was all about him, as warm and intoxicating as he remembered.

He bent his head and said quietly, “Then why are you standing in my way now?”

“I—” Her throat constricted in a jerk, rippling the fabric hugging her neck. “I would like to know how to hand fight. With a dagger.”

He straightened. “A dagger?”

“You know how to use a dagger, don’t you? Or a knife?”

“You want to learn how to fight like a street thief?”

“Yes.”

“And you imagine I could teach that to you?”

“Couldn’t you?”

“I could. But that hardly answers the question of why you wish to learn it.”

“Does it matter?”

He tilted his head and seemed to study her seriously, as he had assessed her while she was shooting. His bright yet dark eyes had never seemed entirely mortal to her, rather from the faery realm. Sometimes during those forbidden hours they had spent together she had imagined that with magic he could see past her words and actions, directly into her soul.

Now the touch of his gaze took her breaths away in little bunches of useless air. The pale sunshine filtering through the window at his back painted a halo around his silhouette, like an image of Saint Michael, with his hard, bellicose beauty restrained only by art.

Abruptly he stepped forward, and she jerked her shoulder back so he passed through the door without touching her.

“You need no dagger. You have sufficient weapons at your disposal already,” he said as he strode away.

“I want to learn how to injure a man at close range,” she said to his back.

He looked around. “And how, I wonder, do you imagine that statement will now inspire me to teach you?”

“You have seen how well I shoot, yet you doubt my application to the task.”

“Your determination seems clear enough. It is the fever in your eyes when you speak of injuring another person that concerns me.”

“I see. Like most men, you fear a woman’s strong emotions.”

“That depends on which strong emotions she is expressing.” He almost looked like he would smile.

He smiled easily, she remembered, more pleased with her company than anyone had ever been before. After that first night, when they met at dawn by the wood, she had made him promise not to touch her again and to not seek to discover her identity. For fourteen days he had held to his promise. But the way he had smiled at her had driven her mad with desire she barely understood at the time. Many times she had had to stop herself from closing the distance he kept between them. She had wanted his kisses far too much.

Now he crossed his arms comfortably over his chest, his stance nonchalant yet so coiled with strength that he seemed at once perfectly at ease and entirely dangerous.

“Do you have one man in particular that you wish to injure,” he said, “or is your prey simply men in general?”

Her stomach twisted.

“How vastly amusing you are, sir,” she said lightly. “In refusing to teach children and women, do you hope to defend your sex from injury at the hands of your inferiors?”

His sudden laughter was deep and warm. “If women are men’s inferiors, the moon is made of marzipan.”

She smiled. “I suppose you are right about that.”

Unfolding his arms, he again turned away.

“Don’t leave today.” She stepped forward. “Lord Michaels and Mrs. Josephs have planned a game of charades for this evening. Dr. Shaw and his daughter as well. I would not want to disappoint them. Will you remain one more night?”

“I’m not much for games,” he said.

“I noticed the chessboard after you and my father played last night.” She took another step toward him. “He invited you to play to intimidate you into acquiescing.”

“He is a formidable opponent. But I am not easily intimidated.”

“Oh. I understand. You have now seen that I can be an apt pupil.” She gestured with her bow. “But pride will not allow you to recant your refusal to him.”

“Pride has nothing to do with it.”

“Give me a chance, an audition, as it were. My father needn’t even know. Meet me in the ballroom tomorrow at dawn before all arise. I will show you that I can apply myself to learning how to wield a dagger with cool dispassion worthy of any man.”

“No, I don’t think I will,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve met you at dawn before, and it ended poorly for me. I have no wish to repeat the experience.”

Her heart tumbled over. “You admit to it?”

“It?”

“The past. Our past.”

“Why not? I haven’t suffered amnesia or any other unlikely fate that wipes memory clean or makes a man deny history.”

“I thought you meant to pretend amnesia. Since yesterday you have behaved to me like a stranger.”

“We are strangers.”

This was not true. From the moment they met he had never seemed like a stranger to her. Alien in his unfamiliar masculinity, yes—but never a stranger. Swiftly and naturally he had taken pleasure in her company as no one else ever had. And like no other person alive, he had spoken with her like an equal. A friend. She’d gotten drunk on him, and she had believed that perhaps he had been a little drunk on her too.

“I’d thought you craven,” she said.

“Merely courteous in not wishing to expose you.” Hand on the hilt of his sword, with a gleam in his eyes he bowed. “My lady.”

My lady. Six years ago he had thought her an upper servant, perhaps a lady’s maid. But he had called her his lady and promised to be her champion, her protector, her blade to wield as she wished. The moment he discovered her name, that she was a noblewoman, that she had allowed him to believe otherwise, the ardor in his eyes had died.  
Now he made light of it.

“Mockery is not courteous,” she said.

“True,” he admitted. “How deplorably unlike a chevalier I have turned out to be.” He cocked a half smile. “Despite my vow.”

There was such a foolish ache in her chest that she wanted to curl her fist into it and press it away.

“It ended as I warned you it would,” she said.

“Given the encouragement you offered me, I would have been one man in ten thousand to believe that warning.”

“I was very clear.”

“An unwise man hangs hopes on gossamer thread.”

Just as then, when he had spoken to her like this, directly, honestly, she wanted to be close to him. But she was no longer a girl. She had learned about men since then. Now she needed him for one purpose.  
Ignoring her spinning nerves, she went forward until she stood before him.

“Do a woman’s words have no weight to you?”

His honey eyes narrowed. “I admit myself confused.”

“By?”

“I don’t think you are a flirt. I don’t think you intend to seduce a man, then disappoint him, not in the usual manner. It does not suit your nature. But, then, I don’t understand why you do this.”

“You wanted what you could not have.”

“I did.” He backed away. “But not this time. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Then what harm will it cause to teach me to fight with a dagger? Please. At least teach me how to hold it correctly.”

For a stretched moment he only looked at her.

“What are you doing?” she finally said.

“I am reconsidering.”

Reconsidering. She drummed her fingertips on the bow. “It is taking too long.”

He lifted a brow. “Impatient, are we?”

“We haven’t much time before we are expected at our toilette to change clothes for lunch.”

“The huntswoman’s leather must give way to the lady’s lace,” he said. “Alas.”

“Alas? You would rather I wear boots in the dining room?”

“Alas that I cannot be present at your toilette.”

She must not smile. Not so easily and swiftly.

“What about ‘forewarned is forearmed’?” she said. “A moment ago you were determined not to flirt with me.”

“That wasn’t flirting. I really am disappointed I haven’t an entre into your boudoir.”

She bit back her smile as he walked away. As always, watching his body move did things to her insides, spun gravity in the wrong direction. But he was leaving.

“Where are you going?”

“Into more light.” Removing his sword and placing it aside, he halted in a splash of sunshine from an open stall window. “Set down your bow, Diana, and come here.”

Diana. He had called her Diana that day in the wood, the virgin goddess of the hunt who would not allow herself to be captured by any god or mortal man.

“Now?” she said. “Here?”

“If you would rather not, my horse is still saddled. I can—”

“No. Yes, now,” she said, elation bubbling. She moved toward him. “Is this because we have spoken of the past and settled it? Bygones and such?”

“Not quite. But now I am thinking of your boudoir and something must be done about that.”

The quiver slipped from her fingers, strewing arrows upon the stable floor.

“I am only a man,” he said simply. “Distraction is sometimes necessary.” He reached into the top of his boot and drew forth a dagger with a blade perhaps five inches in length.

She stared. “You carry daggers in your boots?”

“Just the one, and only in this pair.” He approached her and took the bow from her slack hand. “Unlike the daughters of dukes, apparently, I don’t find that I need quick access to a dagger on a daily basis.”

Not on a daily basis.

Nightly.

He was so close she could breathe in his scent and feel the reaction to it in her body.

“What a staid life you must lead,” she managed to say, watching him set aside the bow with the same grace with which he always moved.

She had known spies and lords, but she had never known a man like this. Ben’s subdued elegance was unmatched. Benjamin Archibald Solo made no statement of dominance, and he had no desire for stealth. With every muscle trained to serve him, he simply moved and it was poetry, art, beauty.

“Do you see where the handle of this dagger touches my palm?” He spread his hand.

“Yes.”

“Watch as I grip it.” His fingers settled again into place. She mimicked the clasp with her empty hand, then spread her fingers. “Your hands are unusually toned for a gentlewoman’s,” he said. “Supple. Do you shoot often?”

“Every day.”

“Why doesn’t your skin show it?”

“My maid files away the calluses.”

He looked up at her face.

“Every day?”

“I am the daughter of a duke. A gentleman does not expect to take a washerwoman’s hand when he asks me to dance.”

Without warning he cupped the back of her hand and rolled the dagger handle into her palm. “Take care,” he said. “It is quite sharp.”

Six years.For six years she had remembered the warmth of his skin, the moment when she had fled his caresses in the dark because she had been afraid of what she might do—what she might willingly give him. Now he held her and she wondered that she’d had the strength to flee.

“How sharp?” She could not command more than a whisper.

He moved away. “I use it to cut saddle leather.”

“How often do you find the need to do that?”

“Not often.” He folded his arms over his chest again and a smile teased the corner of his mouth. “That is why it is so sharp.”

The dagger felt light in her grip, well balanced and natural to hold.

“I am surprised this is so comfortable for me. Your hands are much larger than mine.”

“It’s a good dagger.” His voice was odd—low and somewhat hoarse.

“Now you must show me how to use it.”

“You said you wished to know how to hold a dagger correctly. You are holding it correctly. Lesson over. The road awaits me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come now—”

“Sharp”—he took a quick step back—“blade. Do refrain from speaking with your hands when you are wielding a weapon, my lady.”

My lady, said without mockery.

“There. You have just taught me a second thing,” she said, readjusting her grip on the handle. “Stay for another thirty seconds and I’m sure I will learn all I must to whittle a stick, spear a fish, and skin a hare with this dagger.”

“I have never speared a fish with that dagger.” He moved close again. “Only a man’s quadriceps.”

“Really?” she exclaimed. “Is that how fencing masters spend their leisure?”

“He was poised to impale me with a bayonet. It seemed appropriate at the time.”

“I daresay.”

“But I have in fact used it to skin a hare.”

“How did it taste?”

“It wasn’t mud. So, I would say rather good.”

“That was in Spain. Wasn’t it?” Six years ago he had just returned from the Peninsula. She had wanted to know everything about him, and she had asked and asked.

“Yes.”

Neither of them moved. They stood close and she stared at the dagger in her grip.

“Why do you carry it in your boot now?”

“So that I have it handy to teach ladies whom I encounter in stables, of course.”

“You did not encounter me in this stable.” She turned her face up to meet his gaze. “You followed me in here.”

“It is the place one puts a horse, which I happened to have with me.” Pleasure glinted in his eyes that traveled over her features.

“What else will you show me with this dagger now?”

“How to give it over safely to its owner so that neither of you get cut.”

“No.” She backed up. “I want to learn more.”

“The ‘please’ seems to have gone astray. Interesting.”

She smiled. “Please.”

“This is a single-edged dagger. The edge is sharp, but the weapon is principally intended for stabbing rather than slicing, though it can be used for either.”

“Did you slice or stab the bayonet man’s leg?”

“A bit of each. You are a bloodthirsty girl, aren’t you?”

“I am not a girl.”

His gaze snapped to hers.

“Not any longer,” she said.

“To fight like a street thief,” he said, watching her face, “your movements must be swift and decisive.” He took up an arrow and gripped it mid-shaft, pointing the fletching toward her. “Imagine this is a knife coming at you. Knock it away.” He thrust the arrow forward and she tapped it aside with the dagger.

Both black brows rose. “A knife is coming at you and you bat at it like you would a fly?”

She tightened her grip on the handle. “Do it again.”

He did so and she smacked the arrow away.

“Better,” he said. “Now again, but quicker and with all of your strength. You are fighting for your life, recall.”

She slapped the shaft aside. Swiftly he thrust it toward her again.

“Ten times now, without pause,” he said.

With the dagger she knocked away the arrow shaft, the clacks louder and sharper each time. After ten, he paused and she flexed to relieve the tension in her shoulder.

“Feeling the burn?”

“Yes.”

“Adjust your stance.”

“How?”

“You are standing as though you intend to shoot. Loosen your knees and center the weight of your body over your feet. Tuck in your hips.”

She felt his eyes upon her. “This is a defensive action.”

“Effective if done swiftly.”

“What if the assailant comes from behind?” she asked.

“There are other maneuvers to defend against that.”

“What about offensive moves?”

“A good defense is the best offense.” If a man is not afraid of being killed, he has less reason to kill.”

Her arm halted then slowly lowered to her side. She was breathing far too swiftly for the small effort she had just put forth. The sunlight cast her eyes in an ethereal aura.

“Show me an offensive move.”

She was determined, and he had seen these eyes before: in the face of a courier he had run with, before the lad had set off for what became his final mission, to the front line.

“All right.”

“Wait.” She set down the dagger and began gathering up her skirts between her knees.

“What are you doing?”

“Making it easier to move.” Sweeping fabric back, she tucked it into the sash around her waist. The lightest stockings protected her legs from the chill air and he was staring. And as swiftly as he studied their long, lithe beauty, just as swiftly he wanted them wrapped around him.

“You have done this before,” he said. “The cinched skirts.”

“When I wish to ride astride and haven’t dressed for it,” she said as though the sudden need to ride frequently overcame her before she could reach for a sidesaddle.

But perhaps it did. There was a radiant impetuosity about her here, away from the house and his cousin and her father, that reminded him of that girl six years earlier—the girl who had not been afraid to meet a stranger in a wood at dawn every day. Alone with him again now, she was a glorious mix of that girl and the heiress refined by London. And he was making a colossal mistake to remain in her presence for a minute longer.

She took up the dagger. “Now show me, please.”

He showed her. Instructing her how to readjust her grip on the handle and her stance so that the power of her arm came behind the dagger fully, he tried to ignore while he illustrated the simplest slice.

“Am I aiming for the chest?” she said, practicing the cut.

“There are four principal targets: the face, hands, groin, and Achilles heel. What you choose to strike depends on where you carry your weapon. Assuming it is at your hip, what target would you choose?”

“The groin?”

“Yes. Even a shallow slice there will impair an opponent. And if severed, the femoral artery bleeds swiftly. Try that movement, slowly first.”

She set her hand at her hip then slashed the dagger forward.

“Good,” he said, moving behind her, studying the angle of her hips and the sweet curves of her calves. “Now, swiftly. If you are smaller and weaker than your opponent, your greatest asset is surprise. Drop your shoulder. Throw the force into your forearm.”

She swung again.

“Too low,” he said. “Imagine an actual person before you.”

“You won’t allow me to use you as a target, I suppose.”

“Certainly I will, the next time I wish to be gutted like a fish.” The strength in her arm was impressive, the flush upon her skin beautiful, and he was hard as iron. “Or emasculated,” he muttered.

She laughed, dropped a step back against a stall door, and surprised the cat sitting there. It howled and leaped forward, and she started, stumbled, and tripped on a drape of skirt.

Ben lunged. Hand clamping over her wrist, he grabbed her about the waist, yanking her body away from the dagger.

She fought him.

Wrenching out of his hold, she pulled herself over him, her thighs clamping about his hips, her left hand jamming against the base of his windpipe. The dagger quivered in her right hand a breath from his cheek.

He clamped his hand around hers and she shouted in surprise. But her grip held tight and her eyes were wide with terror.

He could break her fingers to dislodge the weapon. If she were a man, he would not hesitate. If she were any other woman, he would not be in this position. He had dropped his guard with her—again.

She hung above him, hair framing her face, her eyes now clouded as he stroked his thumb from the base of her palm upward.

The pressure on his neck relaxed, and he sucked in air through his bruised windpipe. Again he stroked from her wrist across her palm and along her thumb, cajoling the wild thing she had become, and he choked back the fury rising in him. This was the response of a woman who feared an attack—who anticipated attack.

She was still breathing hard. Once more he caressed her hand holding the dagger, trying to loosen her grip with gentle probing.

Her eyelids fluttered, a downward tick, and her pupils seemed to lose focus. The dagger dropped to the floor and her hand slipped away from his throat. Her palms flattened on his chest.

She rocked her hips into his groin.

Lashes dropping low, her lips parted. With her hooded gaze in his, she rocked against him again.

Then again.

The sigh that issued from between her lips swept his anger away.

Dipping her head, she caught his lower lip between her teeth. Before he could seek her, she released his lip and threw her head back. Her eyes were nearly closed. With a perfectly intentional thrust, she ground into him—once—twice—her body undulating. And she sighed again.

He grasped her hips and jerked her to him. Upon a soft moan, she went with it, pushing harder. Then faster. He helped her, working her tighter against his cock, feeling her against the base and the tip and entirely. She rode him, quick breaths bursting from her, surprised at first and then desperate, punctuated with short, delirious moans.

He felt it when her release overpowered her, the loosening of her body, the shudders. She whimpered, her cries soft and thick with relief. There was pleasure in her voice, her eyes tightly shut, a pink flush suffusing her skin.

His heartbeats were a cacophony of lust and astonishment. Gulping in air, he slid his hands from her hips to her waist.

Her eyes snapped open.

For an instant she seemed disoriented. Then aware.

She clambered backward and off of him, and stumbled to her feet. Grabbing up the bow and quiver, she fled.


	6. Invincible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, please do remember to read the tags. I've had some comments asking me where are the SW characters (other than Ben and Rey) and I'll be honest, I won't include anyone other than Ben, Rey, Rose and Armitage. Others characters, if I ever feel like it, will be included later on, and the tags will keep changing accordingly.   
> I hope you enjoy this one guys!!!

There was no sound in the stable for some time except the usual snufflings of horses and the rustle of barn swallows. When Ben finally drew his hands away from his face and sat up, he discovered the cat perched again where it had been when Rey startled it, now cleaning its paws.

He climbed to his feet and tried not to think of whether she had returned to the house with her skirts snared up behind her and speckled with bits of straw. He tried not to think of her at all as he sheathed the dagger in the inner pocket of his boot and batted the dust from his own clothing. He failed. He thought of her sighs and moans, the strength of her thighs, and her hands gripping his shirt, and had little success at defeating his arousal. But some discomforts must be endured. He had learned that with this very woman years ago.

The duke’s daughter required a word from the duke’s hired employee. But not yet. A man should not enter into battle with a chest full of anger. Instead, he saddled his horse again and set out to cool off.

\--------------

“Doctor, you are a sharp.” Lord Michaels slapped his cards onto the table and chortled. “How do you do it?”

Dr. Shaw gathered the baron’s coins. “I am humbled by your praise, my lord.”

“Papa does not like to boast.” Libby offered a nod that was far too wise for a girl of fifteen.

“Stuff and nonsense, Miss Shaw! Lady Regina, tell this sawbones he shan’t cozen me with talk of humility. If I am to lose, I prefer losing to an arrogant man. At least then I can imagine myself bested only in game rather than in character as well.”

“I won’t tell him any such thing, my lord.” Rey lingered by the bookshelf, trailing her fingers across leather and gold bindings. Here she could partially face the door. The man she had attacked in a stable had disappeared, and despite the rain that had begun to fall with dusk, he had not returned for dinner. “Dr. Shaw is truly humble.”

Dr. Shaw pocketed his winnings. “Thank you, Lady Regina.”

As long as she could remember, he had been a frequent guest at the castle. With a handsome smile and a measured mind, he was just the sort of man she liked best: the sort that did not turn her inside out.

Years ago she had felt that sort of admiration for Jack Doreé, her intended from birth. With his boyish teasing and careless affection he had bruised her tender feelings any number of times when they were children. As they grew, they became closer in a loving bond. But he had never made her want to abandon everything proper and plunge into delirium. He had never made her feel any strong emotion at all—never until that morning a month before their wedding when he discovered her on a footbridge toe-to-toe with another man. Then she had felt shame deeper than Hades.

In the stable, Ben had barely touched her and the need she had taught herself to deny awoke into full, spectacular wantonness. Apparently she had in fact changed very little in six years.

“Lord Michaels, I should like to measure your cranium.” Libby scribbled in a small notebook. The manner in which she bent her golden head over her task was entirely reminiscent of the Duchess of Read. With the same guinea curls and pale blue eyes, Libby exactly resembled the portrait of Rey’s mother as a girl that hung in her dressing room. Yet no one ever spoke of it.

“Whatever for, Miss Shaw?” Lord Michaels said.

“I am doing a study.”

“Ah, I see,” he said thoughtfully, then winked at Rey. “Are you studying men’s heads only?”

“Women’s too.” Libby dipped her pen into the inkpot. “When I was here at Christmastime I measured everybody in the castle and the village. I should like to add your measurements and Mr. Solo’s to my calculations.”

“Where is my cousin?” Armitage looked toward the door. “I could win a pony off of him tonight and recoup my losses.”

“Does he lack talent in card games?”

“Rather, he lacks interest in games in general,” Armitage said. “Except of course swordplay. Has he agreed to your father’s proposal, my lady?” He asked turning to Rey.

“Not to my knowledge.” Not likely. Not after the stable.

“Terribly sorry he didn’t show for dinner,” he said, frowning. “Too used to coming and going as he pleases, I suppose. But he’s an unpredictable fellow at best. I’ve been thinking, and it occurs to me that if my cousin continues in his nonsensical obstinacy, I would be delighted to show you a fencing trick or two.”

“Are you also proficient with the sword?” Libby asked.

“I’m not nearly as fine a swordsman as my cousin. But no one is. Still, if Benjamin doesn’t relent, I’ll be happy to stay on for a bit and share my humble skills with you.”

“If you’re not very good, I don’t know why she would take you up on the offer,” Libby said.

“For courtesy’s sake, Miss Shaw.” His smile broadened and he added sotto voice, “Ladies don’t like to wound a gentleman’s pride, what?”

“I am for bed,” Dr. Shaw said, rising. “I delivered twins before dawn this morning and am fading swiftly. Libby?”

His daughter rose too.

“I am dreadfully fatigued as well,” Eliza said, abruptly rousing from a sitting slumber. “Regina, come along.” She linked an arm through Rey’s and they went out.

Before the tower, Rey released her. “I will say good night here, darling.”

Eliza grasped her elbow. “I shall accompany you to your bedchamber.”

“Thank you.” She tugged away. “But I do know the way.”

“Does the route you prefer require you to accidentally encounter any of your guests?”

“I have forgotten my book in the drawing room. Really, Eliza. You speak as though I could not have misbehaved in London all the many times you left me alone with men over the past five years. Why your particular concern now?”

“Because HE is the only one you have wanted in all five of those years. Rather, six.”

Rey stared at her. “I thought you had forgotten.”

“You nonsensical girl. How could I have? Regina, I shall not mince words. I firmly believe that you will be better served if he leaves at once. Let us hope that then your father will turn his attention fully to your impending nuptials and forget his latest autocratic whimsy. Fencing lessons, indeed.”

“Now you think I should marry the duke? Because Father demands it?”

“Of course not. But removing to town will allow you to consider other suitors. If you choose a suitable gentleman, I suspect your father will not deny your wishes. Now go to bed, child.”

She watched Eliza disappear into her bedchamber then returned to the empty drawing room. Crossing to the sofa, she took up her book and heard a step behind her. He wore the same breeches and coat from earlier, now sodden. They accented his lean frame and the breadth of his shoulders, and his damp hair was swept away from his brow as though he had run his fingers through it. She wanted to do that—run her fingers through his hair. And then all over him.

He came directly to her and she thought he meant to grab her. But he halted just shy of her, surrounding her with the familiar scent of rainy Lothians nights that she loved.

“I thought you meant to depart without speaking to me,” she said.

“Earlier, in the stable, that was not well done of you.” Reflecting the firelight, his eyes were jewels. “I am not an object to be used at the whim of a coquette, then abandoned as swiftly. I am a person, with wishes of my own, and I haven’t a fondness for being used like a slave.”

Her throat was tight. “Haven’t you?”

He tilted his head, uncertain now.

“You were aroused,” she said.

“I would have had to be dead to be otherwise. But how an unwed woman of your status should know such a thing—”

“Come now. I am no longer a downy girl to be transported by a longing glance alone. My father has allowed me considerable liberty.”

He didn’t like that; his eyes retreated. “Liberty?”

“Liberty to learn what I should not,” she finished more quietly than she intended. But her tongue would not obey her entirely, nor her lips that once had learned an innocent intimacy with his.

He stepped back from her. “Forgive me, madam, but I have no right to these confidences, nor interest in them.”

“And yet you began it. You must have heard the gossips’ speculation about me.”

“I ceased seeking news of the inestimable Lady Regina Read five years ago when I was barred from her door.”

She found she could no longer look at him. “I was in mourning.”

“I knew the very hour you came out of mourning. From an impatient yet respectful distance I had anticipated that moment for a year. But I would like to know now, finally, if it was by your order or another’s that I was not permitted to call upon you then. Your father?”

“He did not....” The old shame pawed at her.

“I see.” He nodded, slowly. “But the past is done with. Over. Today’s adventure, however, is another story. I have no complaint with a woman taking her pleasure where she will. In truth, I am flattered.” His eyes scanned her face. “But if you aim to accost a man, ask first. Or at least give him some warning. Then allow him the tender palm as well as the sharp claws.”

“Claws?”

He bent his head, so close that she felt the air stir upon her skin.

“I shouldn’t have minded the teeth if you had offered the lips as well,” he murmured. “If I am to suffer pain, I would like to enjoy the pleasure too.”

She jolted back from him, and her cheeks became ghosts, her eyes like in the stable when she had been startled.

“What have I said?” He had expected raillery from her, more taunting, brazen flirtation—not shuttered fear.

She went around him and swiftly toward the door. “I will inform my father that you will depart tomorrow morning.”

Watching her walk away from him was its own unique blend of respite and torture.

“I will teach you.” His throat felt strangled. “I will teach you how to fight with a dagger.”

She pivoted around. “You will? Despite my claws?”

“I will.” This was a mistake. Only a day in her presence and he was again putting himself at her mercy.

“Why this change?”

Because the memories of his time in the army, where soldiers raped the women prisioners would never leave him. “A woman—all women should know how to defend themselves.”

Relief came into her eyes, tentative but sincere enough to clear away any doubt.

“You understand then?” she said in a whisper.

“I think I do. But I have one condition.”

She was silent a moment. “I suppose I should have expected this, after what I did today.”

“What do you expect?”

Moving again to the door, she spoke without feeling. “If you are no slave to be used by a coquette, I am no prostitute to trade my body for your acquiescence. Good-bye, Mr. Solo.”

Good God. What had she been through?

“That isn’t my condition,” he said.

She turned to him.

“I am willing to teach you upon the condition that Mrs. Josephs, my cousin, or a servant be present at all times.”

Her eyes widened. “A chaperone? Isn’t it too late for that?”

Six years too late.

“I cannot be alone with you,” he said.

“You don’t trust yourself.”

“I trust myself entirely. I don’t trust you.” He went to her because it was too difficult to remain at a distance. “You are an unpredictable, complicated woman, Regina Read. But I needn’t understand you to teach you what you wish to learn.”

“You disarm me,” she only said.

“Beginning tomorrow, I mean to do the opposite.”

“A pun now?” Her lips curved just a bit. “You aren’t truly angry with me, about earlier, are you?”

“Admittedly, I am ambivalent. It was the best time I have ever had in a stable, after all.”

Her cheeks were pink and the light had returned to her eyes.

“After you breakfast,” he said, “meet me in the hall.”

“The hall? But—”

“Here is your first lesson: a student does not ask impertinent questions of her teacher.”

“Then I’m certain I meant to say yes, of course, Master Solo, tomorrow after breakfast in the hall. Shall I hang my head now like a chastened schoolboy?”

“Yes.” He allowed himself a smile. “If you know how to.”

She curtsied, pressed her book against her midriff, and went to the door. There she paused.

“I mean to become invincible, you know,” she said.

“You will.” Even if it killed him.


	7. Calmness, Vigor And Judgement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter there is a short mention of fisical violence in Ben's past. Please read with this in mind or jump this chapter if it's too uncomfortable for you

Before breakfast, Rey rode with Lord Michaels and tried to gently pry from him details of his visits to Edinburgh the previous autumn and at Christmastime.

“Ben’s brother did business with Loch Tay. Shipping and that sort of thing,” he said with a vague wave of his hand. “Thought I’d buy into Tor’s business.”

“Were you able to call upon the Duke of Loch Tay at that time?”

“Oh, well, he wasn’t in town except for a few days or so. But how do you like Sir Walter’s latest? I didn’t know what to expect after Ivanhoe, I’ll admit. What a tome! But that story about the monks was smashingly good, don’t you agree?”

The entire conversation went frustratingly thus. By the time Libby appeared on her horse, Rey had abandoned all hope of learning anything useful from the ginger man this day. Returning to the castle to change her gown for her lesson, she was eager to poke at something with a sharp stick. When she reached the hall, she knew she must be mad to have wanted this. 

Simply looking at him from across a room—cross-armed, leaning against the opposite door, entirely in command of himself—made her marvel that she had even dared to touch him the day before. No wonder she had lost her head.

“Good morning?” He made a show of looking about the empty hall.

“Mrs. Josephs—”

“Has arrived!” Eliza announced as she hurried in, embroidery bag in hand. “I cannot agree with this program. But as you are determined to it, I am glad that at least someone”—she looked pointedly at Ben—“seems to have his wits about him.”

He pushed away from the wall and came forward. “Thank you for sparing your time, Mrs. Josephs.”

“As though I had any choice.” With a crackle of starched skirts, she seated herself in a chair set against the wall beneath a stand of crossed axes.

Rey ventured further into the room. “My companion does not want me to learn how to threaten her with a weapon at close range.”

“After my near encounter with a blade in your hand yesterday,” he said, “I don’t think I blame her.”

“Good morning.” Libby stood in the doorway, her hair tied in a hasty knot. “What are you all doing?”

“Regina is taking instruction in fencing from Mr. Solo. Sit here beside me, child.” said Eliza

Libby obeyed. “I thought you dead set against it, Mr. Solo. Lord Michaels even offered to teach Regina in your stead.”

“Mr. Solo has relented.” Rey made herself walk to him. “Have you insisted we meet here so that I will be awed by this array of weaponry?”

“We are here because you must choose your sword.”

Sword?

“But—”

“I don’t particularly like your father,” he said quietly to her. “But he has hired me to teach you how to fence.”

“He will not know if you do not.”

“But I will.” He allowed that to sit for a moment. “After you have learned the fundamentals of fencing, if you still wish to learn the use of a dagger, I will instruct you in it before I depart.”

She glanced at the walls. “Shouldn’t I learn with a wooden sword first? For practice?”

“No need to dally with toys when we are both eager for haste. I will blunt the tips, in any case. Which of these will it be?”

“Among them all?”

“The saber is a cut-and-thrust instrument. We will leave it aside for the time being—”

“Since I have no plans to fence from horseback.”

“Or to join the army, presumably. Unless that is in fact your ultimate object?”

“Not currently. One never really knows, though.” She felt ridiculously buoyant. But speaking with him like this had always made her feel this lightness inside.

“Choose from the swords with straight blades and hilts like this.” He touched a sword attached to the wall. “This is a smallsword.”

“A gentleman’s weapon?”

“Yes,” he said with a slight smile. “I haven’t the expertise to teach you the Highland Claymore, and frankly you haven’t the heft for it.”

“Really?”

His gaze slowly scanned her body and she felt flush from her toes to her teeth.

“Perhaps a longsword,” he said, decided huskiness in his voice.

Across the room, Eliza cleared her throat.

“I meant, haven’t you expertise with a Claymore?” Rey managed to say.

“A man cannot be an expert at everything.”

“Said without any sincerity whatsoever. You do know how to wield a Claymore.”

“A bit.” His gaze dipped to her lips. “But there is nothing on earth that will entice me to place a weapon of that blunt power in your hands.”

Eliza cleared her throat louder. “I have eyes, sirrah.”

“Eyes that wield a dagger superbly, it seems,” he said to Rey, with a smile.

“And ears,” Eliza shouted.

“What are you sewing, Mrs. Josephs?” he called across the room. “Manacles suitable for a man’s wrists, perhaps?”

“If it suits the man.”

He laughed. “Your companion hasn’t any idea that I am not the party she should be concerned about here, has she?”

Rey’s throat was dry. “You are no gentleman.”

“I don’t recall ever claiming that I was. But then, you are not much of a lady, are you?”

“I thought we settled that last night.”

“I am still listening!” Eliza cried.

“So am I,” Libby said with a little frown. “But I don’t understand the half of what you are saying. It is as if you are speaking in code. Are you a spy, Mr. Solo? Are you, Regina?”

Rey hid her choked breath. 

“I am not, Miss Shaw, but I cannot speak for Lady Regina.” His gaze remained firmly in hers. “We did settle it,” he said in his hot brandy voice. “But I like seeing you blush.”

“Woe to you, sir, for the day your instruction takes root and I employ my new skill in silencing your tongue.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The easy amusement in his eyes became, in an instant, heat. And the desire in her responded.

“Haven’t you swords that you typically use to teach?” she said in a voice like the bleat of a new lamb.

“I do. But as you are not a typical student, I am allowing you this choice.”

“Are you treating me as an eccentric?”

“An unwed duke’s daughter of twenty-four years taking up fencing? Of course not.” He gestured to the walls covered with weapons. “You bought them. You choose.”

She chose her favorite, a slender blade with a hilt fashioned of gold and silver and formed into the shapes of wings on either side.

“Wise choice.” He detached it from the wall and gave it to her. It was much heavier than she expected, but the handle was comfortable in her palm.

“Pinch the grip between your thumb and forefinger,” he said.

“That was a test, wasn’t it?” She watched his face as she adjusted her fingers. “You wanted to see if I would choose a sword suitable to me.”

“I did.”

“Did I pass it?”

“You have chosen an épée. Favored by the French. It is a man’s weapon.” He gestured to another sword. “It is heavier than a foil, which is more appropriate for a woman to wield.”

“Are you saying that I cannot manage this sword?”

“No. You have both height and strength. And you want to fight. You are unusual for a woman.”

“The desire to fight is not unusual for a woman.”

“The desire to use your body aggressively, however, is.” He smiled slightly, privately. 

Inside her, something shifted, tightened, and tumbled over itself in a mess of confusion. How he could do this—be so direct, tease, and yet play no games—she did not understand. She had never known a man who did not keep secrets or pretend to be what he was not. And she had never fallen apart from any other man’s smile.

“Teach me,” she said, and hardly knew whether she wanted him to teach her how to fence or how to be honest.

Eliza’s usual habit after breakfast each day was to nap in the parlor. This daily nap did not require a chair; the cushioned bench at the edge of the ballroom to which they had all moved seemed to suit her just as well. Not an hour into Rey’s lesson, soft snores sounded across the floor, mingling with the patter of raindrops on windows. Libby had long since gone off in search of Dr. Shaw and Lord Michaels, and Rey had not seen her father since before dinner the previous night.

They were alone.

He said nothing of this flaw in his condition for teaching her. His focus seemed entirely on instructing her how to stand, hold her sword, and extend her arm so that the tip of her sword hit a padded wooden mannequin where he directed. Her focus might have been on these things too if she weren’t distracted by the evident strength in every movement he made.

“I admit that this is more difficult than I anticipated. And tiring,” she said after some time practicing the simple arm extension that he demonstrated with such ease—and missing the target on the mannequin nearly every time. Each time he grasped her blade to readjust her position, it made her nerves jerk.

“If it were easy, everyone would do it,” he said.

“Will you now insult me further?”

“Would you like that?”

“Excessively.”

“Then I will not.”

“You are unobliging.”

“And you are leaving your arm and hand open to attack. When fighting with a dagger or knife, any vital region might be the target. But in this your opponent will seek first to disable your sword arm.” He moved to face her, switching the sword into his left hand. “Look at the angle of my blade in en garde, the position of my hand and arm and how the guard protects them from your blade. Study them.”

Men had begged her to stare into their eyes as they declared their devotion. They had entreated her to admire their horses, phaetons, dogs, estates, and occasionally even their drawings and paintings. No man had ever told her to study his body.

“Do you have a picture of it now?” he said.

She could only nod.

“Now, imagine that you stand before a mirror and that I am your reflection. Follow my movements.” He extended his sword arm, and she mimicked him.

His blade tapped hers back into place.

“Wasn’t that right?”

“No. Again.”

Her fingers and wrist ached. She repeated the extension. Again he readjusted her position with his blade, then his hand.

“Again.”

Watching him so closely and ignoring what it did to her insides made her tongue sharp. “You move too swiftly.”

“This is not swift.”

“It is to me.”

Eliza’s snore jolted, then subsided into a regular pattern anew.

“A swordsman’s calm is his greatest asset,” he said. “Anger, frustration, even fear will make you clumsy, hasty, and careless. Whatever your opponent’s skill, if you meet his attack with calmness, vigor and judgment, you are more likely to win.”

She pulled a long breath between her teeth. “I shall keep that in mind.”

“Mimic my movements. Imagine it just as when you were a child and you played the mirror game with other children.”

“I never played a mirror game with other children.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Ah,” he said. “Your parents imagined you too good for the local urchins.”

“No. My mother did not like other people in our house. She was . . . ill.”

“Your cousins, then?”

“They lived at a distance.”

He seemed to consider his next words. “Your former betrothed? Both of them? You told me once that you spent every holiday of your childhood at their estate.”

“They did not play with me. They ran away from me.” She tried to smile, but it slipped. “I was not betrothed to the present marquess.”

He went still. “Never?”

She shook her head.

“And you had no playmates as a child?”

“I had my horse. Now may we continue with the lesson?”

He said nothing, and then after a moment: “Watch, and do what I do.” He switched the blade to his right hand.

“Just now,” she said, “you used your left hand as easily as your right. Are you ambidextrous?”

“Not naturally. My master insisted that I become proficient with my left hand as well as my right.”

“How?”

“He instructed me to use only the left—at all times—fencing, eating, writing. Each time I accidentally favored the right, he struck it with a switch made of sugarcane.”

“Motivation, indeed. How long before you became proficient enough with your left hand so that he ceased the punishment?”

“Three hundred and fifty-one days.”

The urge to seize his right hand and press her lips to it was too strong.

“That is barbaric,” she said.

“Rather, civilized. I was born the son of a merchant of little character and empty pockets. My teacher wished to make me a gentleman. He told me to learn how to use my left hand as well as my right in the event that I should ever lose the use of my right hand. So I set for myself the goal of one year. I considered those fourteen days short of a year a victory.” He took the sword into his left hand and flourished it. “I am still more accurate with the right hand, and quicker. But my teacher was wise. He knew a man is only weak when he allows himself to be unprepared.”

“Invincible,” she said. “You seem to have learned that lesson well.”

“Well enough. We are finished for today.” He withdrew the épée from her hand.

“Will you disappear now as you did yesterday, not to be seen again until midnight?”

“Yesterday I had good cause to disappear.” His gaze seemed to drink her features one by one. “Even if I did do the same today, it should not matter to you.”

“As my father’s hostess, it is my business to see to the comfort of his guests.”

“I am not a guest. I am a servant in this house, paid according to my service to your father’s wishes. Beyond this sword we have nothing more to say to each other now than we did six years ago, had I known it then.”

“Your words say one thing and everything else about you says another. One moment you are the teacher and the next you are . . . this, standing closer to me than you should, looking at my mouth as though you intend to kiss me.”

“In the competition for inconsistency, I have here a worthy challenger. One moment you are the woman in that stable yesterday, and the next moment the girl who had not yet been kissed,” he said roughly. “I hardly know what to make of you.”

“Perhaps you needn’t make anything of me. Perhaps that is an impossible task.”

“What do you want, Rey?”

He called her Rey. She shivered with desire.

She wanted to reach up and stroke the scar that grazed his cheek, to feel it beneath her fingertips and to learn how he had received it. She wanted to feel him.

“I want a husband,” she said.


	8. The Terms Change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you like this one, it's short and sweet. Kudos and comments are the joy of my heart!!

The rain on the windowpanes, Eliza’s snores, and Rey’s tight breaths filled the silence.

“I must marry within the month,” she said. “It is imperative.”

He studied her eyes, then her cheeks and again her lips, the perusal at once intimate and questioning.

“And you tell me this now,” he said slowly, “so that I will teach you how to force an offer from your chosen suitor at dagger point?”

A smile pulled at her lips. “You imagine that I could not secure a fiancé otherwise?”

“I would think that depends entirely on the man you have in mind.”

“Ah. Here you are.” Her father’s voice carried from the doorway. “You have accepted my offer after all, Mr. Solo. My daughter is persuasive, is she not?”

Ben stepped away from her. “She is.”

“Mrs. Josephs?” her father said.

Eliza’s eyes popped open like a bird’s, abruptly alert. “Your Grace?”

“The Duke of Loch Tay has sent word that he is in residence in Edinburgh. We will advance our departure by a sennight.”

“Good heavens.” Eliza went to him in nippy strides. “You expect miracles of me!”

“I cannot fathom, madam, how preparing my daughter for her wedding should cause you distress when that has been your sole task the past five years.”

Rey’s gaze shot to Ben. He was looking at her father, his face impassive.

“There are gowns to be fitted and arrangements to be made,” Eliza said, “and—”

“Make it so. We will depart in a sennight. Mr. Solo, you will accompany us to town, and Lord Michaels as well, I trust.” Without awaiting a reply, he disappeared through the doorway.

“Your Grace.” Eliza hurried after him. “You must understand that there simply is not sufficient—” Her words were lost upon the stairs.

Benjamin moved to the sword rack. His stance was easy now, the tension gone, only the waiting, vigilant grace now in his limbs and shoulders that made her breaths seem to come from somewhere in the soles of her feet.

“What sort of sportsman is the Duke of Loch Tay?” he said.

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“A duke must be well enough occupied with the concerns of his estates that he has little time to spare for amusements,” he said as he came toward her again. “Or perhaps such a man has so many minions doing his bidding that his days are in fact filled with amusements.”

“What are you saying?”

He touched her chin with his fingertips and all the air collected in her throat.

“You have the husband you want, it seems.” He spoke quietly and not quite steadily.

“Not yet,” she whispered. 

“Perhaps after you are wed he could see to your education in swords and daggers. Then I might be free to depart.”

“You don’t want to depart. If you did, you would already have gone. What holds you here?”

He looked into her eyes as though her thoughts were penned upon the irises and woven through her lashes. “Not this game you play.”

“I play no game. I have told you the truth. I wish to learn how to wield a dagger.”

A dart appeared between his brows. “To use against Loch Tay?”

“If necessary.”

His thumb stroked her jaw and the warmth of full summer went through her.

“You could refuse his offer,” he said. “It would be simpler than stabbing him in his sleep at night.”

“I daresay.”

He released her, ran his hand over the back of his neck, and looked about the ballroom. “Where is that damn chaperone?”

“We are alone. And you touched me. You have broken your own rule.”

“I did notice that.”

“Are you so easily swayed from your convictions, then?”

“I am, it seems, when in the presence of your lips.”

She couldn’t help smiling. “Just my lips?”

“The rest of you too. But the lips are the greatest challenge at this time.”

“Shall I wear a veil over the lower half of my face like women of the East do?”

“That would probably help.” His eyes were mystically bright. “I will remain here. I will go to Edinburgh with my cousin in your party. I will teach you. But my terms have changed.”

“Changed? How?”

His big hand surrounded the back of her neck, his fingers spreading into her hair and forcing her face to turn upward. Their lips were a breath apart.

“If you tease, if you flirt, if you come too close or touch me,” he said, the heat of his words upon her skin, “I will take whatever I want.”

“What do you want?” she said with little breath.

“I want your lips. I want the rest of you as well, beneath me, open for me, welcoming me.” His fingertips stroked the nape of her neck, releasing hot remembrance deep inside her. “And this time I will not be hesitant about seizing it.”

“Won’t you?”

“Not a moment’s hesitation. But know this: Whatever happens before you are wed, the moment you say your vows, I will be gone. You will never see me again.”

Never.

“Are we clear on these terms?” he said.

“Yes.”

His hand fell but he did not move away.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “come here prepared to work. I will make you ready to stab your husband through the heart on your wedding night, if you wish.” With exaggerated formality, he bowed. “Good day my Lady.”

She watched him leave, her heart and stomach a twisted mess of pleasure and pain.

\-----------------------

Each morning he met her in the ballroom, always accompanied by Lord Michaels, sometimes Libby and Dr. Shaw, and often Eliza, and he taught her the use of the sword.  
From his post at the side of the room, Huxley called out encouragement and cheerful praise. But the fencing master’s only words to her were instructions: the hand must move in this direction, the feet in that, the tip of the blade there, the hips tilted thus, the elbow there, the eyes not fixed on her target but everywhere at once. Sometimes he remained at a distance as she performed the endless repetitions he demanded, correcting her frequently, and watching carefully with his gaze that could see beneath her skin. When he did touch her, to correct her hand or blade, it was swift and mechanical.

He donned a padded coat and mask and taught her how to maneuver around his blade to hit him. He stood still for these demonstrations, like the wooden training mannequin, except for his sword, which she attempted to knock aside again and again without any satisfaction. And still it was a challenge to actually connect the tip of her sword with his body.

“Concentrate,” he said again. “You have lost your focus.”

Her focus was on him too closely, on the hard line of his jaw and the luxurious set of his mouth.

“Fencing is a conversation with swords,” he said. “Your attention does not drift away in the midst of tea table chatter. It should not here.”

She parried and did not respond. She wanted to tease him. To flirt with him. Especially she wanted to laugh with him. Laughing with him had always been as natural as breathing. But his threat sealed her lips.

After their lessons each day he disappeared from the castle. With obvious affection, Armitage said that since the war his cousin preferred solitude.

“Too many horrid cramped quarters in muddy tents, I daresay,” the ginger man commented with a chuckle that made Libby frown, Dr. Shaw nod, and Rey lose her appetite. When she had first met Ben, he told her how the simple scents of civilization—beeswax candles, fresh water, and her perfume—were like heaven.

At night, exhausted in every muscle, she fell onto her bed upon her back, ran her hands over her sore body, and tried not to think of him. Thinking of him made her ache in places she should not ache. Six years had changed nothing. He was still forbidden to her. Only now it was by his own choice.


	9. A Pink Parasol

The Duke of Read’s house in Edinburgh smelled of fresh paint, wood varnish, and the bouquets of spring flowers that adorned tables throughout. Elegant and classically austere on the exterior, it commanded an enviable position at the center of a row of homes perched upon the long ridge across the valley from the cramped medieval city. Gorgeously appointed within and newly refurbished in haste, the house bespoke wealth and luxury and a hint of London style.

Her father loathed it. Upon entering, he gave the renovations a swift perusal, then immediately went off to his club. Miserable in every bone and muscle from a week of demanding lessons followed by hours in the carriage, Rey took dinner in her bedchamber and fell into sleep.

As she entered the dining room the following morning, Dr. Shaw greeted her.

“What a remarkable improvement you have had made to this house since your return to Scotland, Regina,” he said as she took a cup of tea.

“Thank you.” She sipped, unable to sit or eat. Soon she would recommence her investigation into the disappearances of Cassandra Finn and Maggie Poultney. She would pay calls on Edinburgh’s most avid gossips and the police inspector heading the investigation, and await her meeting with the Duke of Loch Tay.

But the true cause of her twisted stomach now appeared in the doorway to the dining room as comfortably as if he had been born in a duke’s house, watching her now with a predatory air. A pink lace parasol was propped against one broad shoulder.

“You mustn’t mind that your father does not like the place, child,” Eliza said. “His memories of it are all of your mother. Like you, she was far too beautiful. Men do not like to be thwarted by beautiful women.”

“Too true, Mrs. Josephs,” Ben said, his gaze never leaving Rey. “I see that town hours have made you indolent already, my lady. It is past time to begin your lesson today. Will you thwart me this morning, and eschew instruction in favor of the enticements of the city?”

“And raise my instructor’s ire?” she said. “Certainly not.” She went to the door.

He shifted only enough for her to pass by and said quietly, “It is not my ire that you raise every day.”

She tripped on her own feet and he gently but firmly held her arm to steady her.She ignored the heat that bathed her face. There was nothing to be done about it. No one had ever spoken to her like this, so bluntly, so plainly expressing his desire for her. Men flirted, courted, requested dances, rides in the park, strolls. They escorted her to picnics, balls, supper parties, even to the races. They praised her eyes, her gowns, her horse, her parties, her skill on the pianoforte. They wrote poetry to her, sent posies, flattered Eliza in hopes of gaining an ally, went to their knees with offers of marriage, and promised her undying adoration.

Only this man told her directly and honestly that he desired her. He had told her this from the beginning, giving a name to the intensity of heat and yearning she had felt as she stared at him from her hidden place in the ballroom at Fellsbourne. He told her, kissed her, welcomed the wanton in her. Then he had showed her how a man driven by desire needn’t be controlled by it.

Now he followed her across the foyer and to the back of the house.

“How is it that the ballroom in this house is more spacious than that at the castle?”

“This house was built for entertaining.” She paused at the door to the ballroom. The expanse of oaken floor shone with polish, and tall windows along one side shed spring morning light upon the white walls. “The ballroom at the castle was an afterthought.”

“Medieval lairds preferred chain mail to silk knee breeches?”

She turned to him. “And swords to dance cards. Like you, I suppose.”

“You haven’t seen me dance.” In his eyes was simple pleasure she had not seen for a week. It carved out a haven of pleasure inside her too.

“At all of those balls we have both attended,” she murmured.

“Did you miss me at those balls? Each time a paunchy fellow in collars up to his ears requested your hand for the quadrille, did you sigh and think, ‘How I wish that handsome soldier sought me now instead of this uninteresting fop. I wonder where that soldier is? I wonder if I will ever have the opportunity to dance with him after all?’”

“Yes.” Yes. “At every ball.”

His smile was slow.

She glanced at the parasol. “Are you intending to take a stroll? I’m not certain that particular shade of lace suits your waistcoat. But I don’t suppose anybody here will mind it, especially if you avoid the most fashionable promenades.”

From the handle of the parasol, he drew a thin, gleaming blade.

“This is a sword stick.” Slowly he slid it back into the handle. “It fastens here and requires only the simultaneous depression of fingertip and thumb to release it. Take care in doing so. Like a smallsword, it is a thrusting weapon, but the blade is not dull.” He demonstrated the release and then the catch that secured it in place inside the handle.

“I think I have never felt quite so lightheaded watching a man wield a parasol before.”

A smile hovered about his perfect lips. “Have you ever seen a man wield a parasol?”

“If I have, this has blotted out all other memories of it.”

“Flatterer.” He offered it to her. “That was flirting, by the way. Do you even know when you’re doing it?”

“I have exhibited great discipline for many days.” She took the parasol into her hands and put her fingers to the clasp. “At present, however, I am overcome by awe of this remarkable device. And your abruptly high spirits have distracted me. My vigilance slipped.”

“Bad habits die hard, hm?”

“You are the only man I know who considers mild flirting a bad habit.” She explored the fastening mechanism. It was nearly indiscernible. “This is my parasol,” she said in surprise. “Eliza gave it to me for my birthday last year.”

“I requested it of her.”

“Why did neither of you tell me?”

“I have never made a sword stick of a parasol. I didn’t know if I would do so successfully.”

“It seems you have succeeded splendidly.”

“I had help. A bladesmith in the old town.”

“I wonder what he thought you wanted with such a thing?”

“He did not ask.” He crossed his arms. “But I don’t recall him becoming lightheaded when I wielded it.”

She squeezed her thumb and forefinger together on either side, and the blade snapped free silently. “This is truly wonderful.”

He seemed to be watching her, both her face and her hands.

“Grip it as I showed you how to grip the dagger, with your thumb toward the blade. But perhaps succeeding events wiped that detail of that day from your memory.”

“You wish to make me uncomfortable, don’t you?”

“No. I wish to reinspire you.”

Her tongue went abruptly dry. “All week at the castle you were aloof.”

“Rumor below stairs has it that your ducal suitor is soon to make an entrance. The time for opportunity grows short.”

She turned her eyes up to him. “I flirted with you only moments ago. I broke your rule.”

He bent his head and said by her ear. “You did not realize you were doing so. It does not count.”

She laughed and felt full of stars. “So, I must flirt, tease, or touch you intentionally?”

“I count on it.” He gestured her into the ballroom.

She went but her nerves were awhirl. If she touched him, he would kiss her. He would wrap his big hands around her hips again and draw her close, and kiss her.

He was looking at her hands. “Have you ever wielded a Scottish dirk?”

“Never.” She loosened her fists. “I purchased several. My father put them on the walls.”

“I saw them. Using a blade of this length requires similar maneuvers to a smallsword, but as with a dagger the hand is unprotected by a guard, so lengthy engagement is unwise, especially for a novice.” He held out his hand and she passed the blade to him. He returned it to the parasol handle and set it down. “For now, we will put this aside—”

“But—”

“And continue with the épée until you have perfected your parries.”

“When might that be?”

“Anytime before you wed, my lady.” His voice was steady but low.

“You taunt me with what I cannot have.” She nodded at the parasol.

“Turnabout is fair play.” He seemed to draw a deep breath, and peered over her shoulder. “Now where is your chaperone?”

“I am here!” Huxley called as he hurried in, coffee in one hand and muffin in the other. “Miss Shaw will be along shortly. She is determined to regale me with her latest examination of the human brain. It seems we men have smaller brains than you women, Lady Regina. Not much of surprise, is it? My cousin’s requirement that I sit here each day is proof of it.”

“He wishes to protect my virtue,” she said so primly that Ben nearly laughed. But there was some trouble in her face that he did not like.

“By setting me as watchdog?” Armitage cracked a laugh. “Why, if you’d been with us the night—”

“We will spend another day practicing parries.” Benjamin moved to the sword rack. “After that I will teach you an attack to the groin.”

“You see, my lord,” she said, turning a smile upon his cousin that had everything of dissembling in it, “he intends to make of me a true menace to the male population of Scotland.”

“England and Wales too.”

Armitage rolled his eyes. “Why a woman can’t be satisfied with menacing poor, unsuspecting fellows with her beauty alone, I will never understand.”

“Swords never fade, Lord Michaels. I believe Mr. Solo interrupted you a moment ago. Do tell me about that night—”

“Good day, everybody.” Libby came into the room with her sketching notebook.

“Good day, Miss Shaw,” Huxley exclaimed. “I am all eager curiosity to hear about the inferiority of the masculine brain.” He winked at Regina.

She took up her sword. “En garde—Oh.” She straightened. “I have torn my hem again.” She tugged at her skirt by the knee and a portion of it draped over her foot. “This is the third already. I will run through gowns before I am perfect at parries.”

Benjamin set the tip of his blade to the floor. “Is this an excuse to shirk your lesson?”

“I have no wish to shirk my lessons. They are my favorite part of every day.”

For a moment Ben could say nothing. “I give you leave to go off and change your gown now.”

“Too much of the morning is already advanced, and I have calls to pay later. Today I will train in torn muslin and tomorrow I will seek a solution to stepping on my hems.” She offered him a smile with her eyes. “I am not so easily defeated, Mr. Solo.”

Because he had to, he said, “Nor am I, my lady.”


	10. The Rules Are Broken

The following day, Rey awoke to daybreak and dressed quietly, then went on stockinged feet to the ballroom. According to Mr. Viking, the footman who had come with them from the castle and knew everybody’s business, Ben greeted each day in the ballroom and remained there until her lesson. This morning she had good reason to find him early, and not to alert Eliza or Huxley.

On the ground floor she could hear the clink of pans and the rumble of hushed conversation in the kitchen below, where the servants were already at work. Today she would instruct Cook to bake poppyseed cakes, favorites of the ladies she had called on yesterday afternoon, whom she expected would return the visit soon. None of them had spoken openly about the disappearances of the two girls. But when news of the Duke of Loch Tay’s arrival in Edinburgh entered conversation, sideways glances abounded.

She had navigated the treacherous currents of London gossip for five years, learning tidbits of information that helped her fellow Resistance Club agents solve mysteries. Someone in Edinburgh must know more than they were saying as yet. She would encourage gossip and pretend to confide and bide her time, and she would solve this mystery.

Opening the door to the ballroom with a silent turn of the handle, she peeked inside.

In the dim light of dawn that carpeted the ballroom floor, he moved with a grace at once poetic and powerful. He wore only breeches and his skin gleamed with moisture. Shadows and light shifted upon him with each twist of muscle, each thrust and advance, each moment of stillness that became action. The sword in his hand caught the morning upon its steel and, in a dance of violence and beauty he transformed the dawn into tiny, glittering miracles.

“Enough now, Viking,” he called across the room. “You cannot require more than five minutes of rest. You are barely forty.”

The footman arose from shadows in the corner of the room. Dragging a foil at his side, he went to the sword master. He wore a padded coat, mask, and gloves.

“While your taunting provides me with a chuckle, sir,” the footman said without any evidence of amusement, “I am not a sportsman like yourself and haven’t the stamina required to rise before dawn in order to be a target for an expert.”

Ben laughed. 

Oh heavenly sound

“No excuses, man. As I recall, you volunteered for this.”

“Only because I wearied of scrubbing the mud from your boots after every extended walkabout. This method of expending your energy seemed preferable.” He sighed and wiped his brow with a kerchief. “But it seems that you are indefatigable.”

Benjamin folded his weapon beneath his arm and bowed. “Your fortitude does you justice, Viking. But I would not trouble you if you weren’t such a damned fine sparring partner. You keep me on my toes.”

“And yet you do not wear mask or jacket while we spar,” the footman said skeptically.

“I fight better when in danger. You should try it.”

“You might practice with Lord Michaels. I understand he is a remarkably good swordsman.”

“Whose mornings begin no earlier than ten o’clock, on his good days. Who taught you how to fence?”

“My former employer, Professor Oliver Highbottom, emeritus master of classical archeology. Until he passed away several months ago, I was his sole companion and he demanded it of me for years before he grew too feeble for it. Who taught you to fence?”

“The murderous husbands of women I bedded, of course. A man learns swiftly by example when he is bleeding,” he said with a slash of a grin.

“You, sir, are a scoundrel. I cannot fathom why His Grace welcomed you into his house.”

“That makes two of us. Now, villain, en garde.”

Mr. Viking lifted his sword and they saluted each other. Then steel met steel, the sound carrying across the room with clinks and the footman’s occasional gasps, while the maestro called the touches.

Rey watched, peculiarly, wonderfully hot. She had heard his skill praised, and during their lessons he demonstrated maneuvers for her to learn. But she had never seen him fight—not like this, not an actual opponent, even in practice. He did so with confidence and exceptional speed. He was astonishingly fast, yet without any appearance of haste or even urgency. Grace and ease marked his movements, as though Nature had fashioned him for this with some secret purpose of her own.

The bout was quick. When they lowered their swords, Mr. Viking bent over, gasping. Ben turned toward his clothing on a chair, and like that night years ago, across the ballroom he noticed her.

“Good morning,” he said with the shadow of a smile. “This is a surprise.”

Swiping a kerchief across his face, Mr. Viking bowed. “My lady.”

She walked into the room and Ben’s gaze dropped to her body. She had worn men’s clothing many times before when training her horse. The stable hand, Fingal, was nearly her size, and she had first borrowed breeches, shirt, and waistcoat from him. After that she had a set made for her.

But Fingal’s appraisals had never made her feel quite so unclothed. And yet Ben’s body was actually unclothed. Upon the honed contours of his chest that was damp with sweat, among other smaller scars, a long slash ran from his ribs downward to cross his waist.

“I thought we could begin early today,” she said.

“No chaperone?”

“They are all still abed. Perhaps Mr. Viking will serve.”

“Viking,” he threw over a bare shoulder, “stay for a bit and watch her ladyship hit me as you never can.”

“I hit you because you stand still and allow me to,” she said. “What was that leaping forward you were both doing? It seemed more than a regular advance.”

“The French call it an elonge. A lunge. Impossible for a woman wearing a narrow skirt. Not today, however, it seems.” He scanned her legs and his sideways smile appeared again.

The footman came forward. “I am terribly sorry, my lady, but I have a dozen tasks to complete before breakfast. Shall I summon one of the ladies from the kitchen?”

“No. Lord Michaels or Mrs. Josephs will be along shortly.”

He set his foil in the rack and departed.

“Neither your companion nor my cousin rise before nine o’clock,” Ben said.

“It is best if fewer people see me dressed in this manner, of course.” She moved past him to the sword rack.

“I should no doubt be included among the many,” he said.

She turned around and discovered his gaze upon her behind. Slowly he lifted it to her face, the languid caress moving over her hips, waist, and breasts.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what? Like I would enjoy eating you for breakfast?”

“Mr. Viking was right. You are a scoundrel,” she said with wretched unsteadiness.

“But a scoundrel with rules. And you are breaking all of them.”

Now he did not look at her body. He looked at her eyes, and the amusement had disappeared from his.

Her lower lip was tender between her teeth. “I think you want me to break the rules.”

“Clearly I am a glutton for suffering.”

Suffering.There was bleakness in the taut lines of his face. He turned away and took up his shirt.

“Shall I go now and change my clothes?” she said, watching the cloth fall down over his back.

“Into what?” He pulled his waistcoat over his shoulders. “A kerchief? Or perhaps a shawl draped about you, like Salome dancing for King Herod?”

“Would a nun’s habit do?”

“Then we would truly be in trouble. I would imagine you my confessor and unburden myself of all sorts of sins.” He took up a cane and her pink parasol, and came toward her.

“I would not mind that.”

He halted before her. “Yes, but then my dashing mysteriousness would be all in pieces. We cannot have that, can we?”

“I guess not. Did you come by that scar on your face in the manner you said to Mr. Viking?”

“What did I say to him?”

“That cuckolded husbands wounded you in duels.”

“You heard that?”

“Yes. Is that how you received that wound?”

“No, that was chaff,” he said. “I have only ever fought for the honor of one woman, and this particular scar was not my reward for it.”

“That long scar. On your chest?” Her gaze dipped to where his shirt gaped at the neck, and Ben felt it—upon his skin, in his blood, and clamoring through his groin. Snugly contained in a pristine shirt and waistcoat, her breasts pressed against the fabric. Her sleeves were tight, like the breeches that clung to her thighs and hips. He was half hard, half helpless, and entirely angry.

“Not that scar either.” He offered her the parasol. “Work. Now.” Words were a luxury he hadn’t the tongue for at present. Or the brain.

“With this?”

“Yes.”

“But you said—”

“My time in your father’s household grows short.” God willing. Rose Edwards had not been at home yesterday. But Armitage would call upon her again today and renew his courtship. “If you wish to be prepared to defend yourself against unwanted attention, we must speed up this instruction. How much time do you have here this morning? Or do you intend to take my cousin about to all of your friends’ houses again today?”

“Could you be jealous?”

“Not at all. I have enjoyed more than enough of his company over the past three decades. He may share his time with anybody he wishes now.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know it isn’t. What do you want with him?”

Her chin ticked up. The curse of it was that defiance only made her more beautiful. When she was uncertain, he wanted to ease her confusion. But when her confidence came to the fore, he simply wanted her.

“I am fond of his company that you so blithely cast aside,” she said. “He is vastly diverting.”

“Not to you. I see you with him. I hear you speak to him. He isn’t clever enough for you, yet you allow him to believe he is. Why?”

Her lashes dipped down a bit. “For the opportunity to become better acquainted with his friends.”

She was telling the truth. Over the course of a fortnight six years earlier he had memorized every one of her smiles. Now he had come to know the tones of her voice as well: the brightness of her amusement, the brittle edge of her anger, the silken chords of her teasing, and the clarity of her honesty. Still, she hid something behind those curly lashes now.

“Aren’t they also your friends?” he said.

“I have spent little time in Edinburgh since my childhood. Lord Michaels has visited twice in the past year.”

“Rey, don’t tease him. For all that he is often an idiot, he is a good man, and his heart is already claimed.”

“I don’t want his heart,” she said, lifting her gaze to meet his squarely, and that unruly organ in Ben’s chest turned over.

“Be that as it may, if he sees you in this ensemble”—he gestured to her breeches—“it will confuse him.”

“Confuse him?”

“Men are easily addled by lust.”

She pivoted, walked to the ballroom door, and closed and locked it.

“There. Now no one will be addled by me today.” She palmed the handle of the parasol and set the blade free. “Shall we begin?”

“You have just locked yourself in a room with me.”

“I have. Yet I am tranquil. Of the two of us, really, I am becoming convinced that you, not I, are the flirt. I don’t think you meant your threat to me. Or perhaps you are simply a sad failure at following through on your ultimatums.” She flexed the short sword before her experimentally. “Now, pray show me how to use this instrument to wound a man.”

He could not move. “You speak of wounding a man like it means nothing to you.”

“On the contrary. It means everything.”

There it was again in her voice: the sharp edge of fear coated in determination.

“Have you?” he said.

“Wounded a man?”

“Wounded the man that you wish to wound?”

Her throat constricted in a movement so jarring that it swept the air from Ben’s lungs. He hated that she had been hurt. He hated the man that had hurt her. He hated that he had not been there to protect her then, and that he had no right to protect her now.

She did not reply.

Tucking the cane beneath his arm and lifting his hands to button his waistcoat, he went toward her.

“A sword stick is not a gentleman’s weapon. Like a hidden dagger, it is a weapon of stealth and surprise.”

“An assassin’s tool,” she murmured.

“We will begin by learning how to employ the entire parasol as a weapon to defend against an attack by knife or sword. Then I will show you how to release and withdraw the blade from the handle in a manner that allows you to strike with it as swiftly as possible.”

“Awkwardly fumbling with one’s parasol is not an effective method of defending oneself?” Her lovely eyes smiled tentatively.

“I wouldn’t think so,” he said, the tension beneath his ribs easing. “But never having had a parasol of my own, I cannot speak to the issue with confidence.”

“You should.”

“I should what?”

“Carry a parasol.”

“To protect my delicate complexion from the sun during my strolls through the park on Lord So-And-So’s arm?”

She chuckled. “Of course not.”

“Then—”

“To make me lightheaded.”

Quite swiftly, without any effort whatsoever, Ben imagined several things he could do to her to make her lightheaded, and none of them involved parasols.

“Focus,” he said. “Now.”

She offered him a smile not of flirtation, but of real pleasure, and he nearly walked out of the room. This Rey was much harder to resist than the flirt.

Diligently she applied herself to practicing parries and attacks with the parasol until she performed them with ease. She mastered the quick release of the blade swiftly, and the safe, active grip of the handle with a bit more application. As the sunlight crossing the ballroom floor grew brighter, he taught her how to hit with it.

“What? No endless series of defensive maneuvers that I must first master?” Strands of hazel hair dangled to her neck and cheeks, a single lock draping nearly to her eyes, which shone now. He already knew she enjoyed challenging herself and that it made her radiant. But each time he witnessed it, he lost a little of his mind again.

“A cane or parasol or similar object is useful for defense. But one does not deploy a hidden sword unless one intends to abruptly attack another,” he said.

“I daresay.” She brushed the lock from before her eyes and it slipped entirely from the binding. She tucked it behind her ear. He stared. He could swallow her whole, then he might feel inside him the simple happiness that she seemed to feel at moments like this, like the humble floorboards deliriously lapping up glorious sunshine.

“Fret not,” he forced across his tongue and lifted his sword. “There will be plenty of grueling repetition to dull the brief pleasure of learning this attack.”

Upon a dramatic sigh, she set her stance. “Real pleasure must always be fleeting, mustn’t it?”

“Not if you’re doing it right,” he mumbled.

Her eyes snapped to him. She blushed, a swift splash of brilliant pink sweeping up her sublime neck and over her cheeks to the very tip of her nose. Parting her lips, she released a short, audible breath. And the partial arousal that Benjamin had been battling for two hours became partial no more.

After that, he depended on two and a half decades of familiarity with the sword and the conditioned reflexes of his muscles to teach her what he had promised. For his thinking brain had gone on holiday.

Addled.

Worse than addled.

Considerably worse.

He became an unforgiving taskmaster. Swiftly Rey came to regret having ever said a word to him since she entered the ballroom, and most grievously the words that had transformed her lesson in wielding a deadly parasol into military training.

He did not spare her. Instead of donning the usual padded coat and commanding her to hit him, he set before her the wooden mannequin and instructed her to advance and retreat endlessly, sheathing the blade each time then snatching it out to attack the wood over and over again. Then he ordered her to back up and he taught her how to lunge. Within an hour she could not feel her hand or wrist. But her thighs and calves provided misery enough for the entire rest of her body anyway.

“My arm is lead.” She dropped back into en garde.

“Again, swiftly,” he said.

“Quite literally.” She whipped the blade free of the parasol and thrust it into the mannequin and her hair, damp with sweat, fell again over her eyes. “If I were to make an incision in my skin, beneath it would be a metalsmith’s dream.”

“Count aloud upon each strike, to ten, and then begin again. One, two, three—”

“Four.” She thrust. “Five.” Again. “Six—this repetition both exhausts and bores.”

“It is necessary if you wish to master the skill.” He had instructed her to direct her attention forward, toward her invisible assailant. Now she saw her teacher only in the periphery of her sight. He had retreated to a distance and spoke now to her as he had at the castle, dispassionately.

“I have learned the positions,” she said, striking the mannequin yet again. “Why can’t I try to hit you now?”

“The movements must come without thought. For this, your muscles must know them as well as your mind. How long has it been since you had to think of the actions needed to slow your horse from a gallop, or to turn her midstride?”

“A lady never reveals her age.”

“You told me your age within minutes of first speaking to me.”

Pleasure tingled through her screaming muscles. “You should not have remembered it.”

“Social niceties have never been my concern,” he said in an altered tone, lower, not quite even.

“Seven . . . eight . . . I will never master this.”

“You have.”

She halted, dropping her weary arm to her side. “I have?”

“You will.” His arms were crossed over his chest, the linen pulling at his wide shoulders, and his mouth was set in a hard line. The honey of his eyes was like a forest at night, forbidding.

“If I am doing well, why are you glowering?”

He unfolded his arms and started toward the door. “Continue without me.”

She swiveled about. “Where are you going?”

He reached for the key in the lock. “Elsewhere.”

“You cannot leave yet.” She did not want this to end yet. She did not want it to end ever. “My lesson is not over.”

“Practice as long as you wish.”

“If you leave, how will I know that I’m doing it right?”

Silence crossed the ballroom.

He released the handle and strode toward her. He halted so close that she could see the texture of the scar from his eye toward his cheekbone.

“The instant you saw me approach, you should have raised your weapon again. Harm comes to a victim who fails to react swiftly to a threat.” The rough syllables ignited her exhausted nerves like sparks.

“I did not know that you intended me harm.”

He wrapped his arm about her waist and dragged her to him.

Thigh to thigh, hip to hip, he held her securely as his gaze swept her face and everything inside her erupted in heat. The perfection of his mouth mesmerized her. Once upon a time she had kissed that.

“The pull of fabric here”—his hand curved with purpose around her shoulder, then smoothed firmly beneath her arm and, with aching slowness, caressed the side of her breast—“and here”—his palm arced along her waist, over her hip to surround her buttock—“is how you will know that you are doing it right. And this”—he tugged her hips tightly to his, and the hard length of his arousal pressed into her—“is how you know that your lesson is over.”

For an instant there was not enough air in the world. Then the panic rose. Swiftly. The crawling dread. His hands on her were strong. Powerful. Locking her in place.

“According to your own accusation,” she forced across her sticky tongue, “shouldn’t you have asked permission to hold me like this? Or at least given me warning?” Her voice was thin. “Hypocrite.”

Abruptly he released her.

The ballroom door swung inward. The butler stood in the opening.

“My lady, His Grace requests your presence in the upstairs parlor. The Duke of Loch Tay has arrived.”

“So early?” Her hand was slippery on the grip of her sword. “I must change my clothes. Tell my father I will come shortly.”

“Very good.” He withdrew.

Ben stood motionless, his eyes steady upon her.

“Are you all right?” he said.

She could say nothing that would not reveal herself entirely. She nodded.

“Go ahead, now. Your duke awaits you.”

Setting down the sword stick, she went.


	11. The Duke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added a little nod to my fav author Jane Austen. Can you spot it? ;-)

Rey’s first thought upon entering the parlor was that Gabriel Adair looked remarkably like he had twenty years ago, when he still had a father and an elder brother and did not expect to inherit the dukedom. He was considerably taller, of course. And the prominent nose and severe jaw that had made him a homely boy now rendered him a shockingly attractive man, albeit in a saturnine fashion, with ebony hair and gray eyes and an air of earthy gravity about him. He wore his black coat loose and his cravat tied in a simple knot. He appeared to be scowling at her. But perhaps that was merely the cast of his brow.

An intelligent brow. Intelligent eyes.

From beside her, Rey heard Eliza’s slow intake of breath. Indeed. If appearance were all there was to a man’s identity, the Duke of Loch Tay could easily be the leader of a Satanic cult.

Surrounded by his dogs, her father made the introductions.

“Good day, Your Grace.” She curtsied low.

Loch Tay frowned. But he bowed in a perfunctory manner that made her want to laugh.

“You’re as pretty as you were when we were bairns,” he said. “’Tis inconvenient.”

“I am honored that you remember me.” She gestured to the footman for tea.

“The duke has only a short time for this call,” her father said. “Given the purpose of it, I will leave the two of you alone to become reacquainted.” He gestured Eliza toward the door.

“Oh, no, Your Grace, I could not leave my lady in a gentleman’s company without chaperonage,” Eliza said, disregarding the last several hours during which she had napped while Rey was alone with her fencing instructor. “I will remain here.”

Her father nodded at Loch Tay. “Sir, until tomorrow.” Flanked by his dogs, he left the room.

“Tomorrow?” Rey said, moving to the tea table. “Have you and Father plans for an outing?”

His dark brows dipped. “I’m to host a party tomorrow night.”

“Will there be whiskey punch?” Eliza asked.

“My friend is trying to shock you. You are advised to ignore her. Have a seat, do.”

He peered down at her. Then he moved forward and took a seat so close to her that she could see where his valet had nicked his chin while shaving him.

She poured tea. He took it up in his ridiculously large hands but did not drink. His fingers were stained with black that was not ink. It looked like pitch. He said nothing, and after a moment bounced the teacup in his palm until it splashed onto his breeches. He seemed not to notice this, but studied her even more closely.

“Would you care for a stronger beverage?” she asked. “Claret, perhaps? Brandy?”

“No.” He set the cup on the table. “Your father has offered a remarkable price for you. Now I understand why. Your beauty is unmatched.”

This time she did laugh. “I am gratified to learn that the price suits the mare.”

His eyes squinted, revealing shadows beneath them. “But you’re long in the tooth to be yet unwed. Tell me now, lass, be you a maiden?”

“Well, it seems I needn’t have had concern over my companion’s conversation after all.”

At the door, the footman announced, “Lord Michaels.”

The duke rose to his feet like an anchor being hauled from the sea, and now she saw quite clearly his weariness. He was awkward and uncivilized and most certainly exhausted.

“Your Grace!” Lord Michaels said with a broad smile. “What an honor to see you again so soon.”

The duke’s dark brow cut down. “’Tis a tragedy, your cousin.”

The baron nodded soberly. “Thank you.”

“Your cousin?” she said.

“Benjamin’s brother died at sea in January.”

“I—” His brother? “I am so sorry.”

“If I had known what lay in wait for him on that voyage I would have gone too. Solo knew, I think. Clever fellow. Not quick enough to halt a bullet, though.”

Her hands were numb around the porcelain. Ben had said nothing of it to her. That this omission stunned her only proved that she was still misguided enough to believe she could ever know a man.

“How does business go along these days, sir?” Armitage said more lightly now.

“I feel the lack o’ your cousin acutely.”

“Were you in business with Mr. Solo’s brother?” she asked.

“Aye. Of a sort.” Abruptly, he stood. “I’ll be taking my leave now. Will you come tomorrow eve?”

She rose and went toward the door with him. “Would my answer to your earlier question determine whether or not you welcome me to your party?”

His eyes cut to her face. Then his mouth tightened.

“I am a man of few words, lass, and even fewer bonnie words.”

“I do not require bonnie words. Merely courtesy.”

He stared down at her with a black frown. “If it’s courtesy you want, you’d best be seeking a groom elsewhere.”

“I daresay,” she said, then smiled. “But I will no doubt enjoy your party tomorrow anyway.”

Something that might have been humor glimmered for an instant in his eyes. Then it was gone, and he departed.

Lord Michaels sat again and plucked up a cake from the tea tray.

“Peculiar fellow. Though if you’re to wed him, I shouldn’t say such a thing, should I? Rather, what a capital sort, the duke is!” A grin filled his face.  
She returned to him at the tea table. “My lord, you are incorrigible.”

“Been told that before. Lady Catherine DeBourgh said it. She likes to put a man in his place.” He took up another cake. “Are wedding bells in the offing, my lady, or am I precipitate to ask?”

“You are precipitate, and outrageous.”

“I am.” He leaned back and spread his arms along the back of the sofa. “It’s why all the ladies like me. No brooding angst here. Why, we’ve only known each other a fortnight and we are such good friends already that here I am guessing at your wedding plans.” He twisted his lips till his cheeks became hollows. “So . . . are they? The wedding bells?”

She took up her cup. “You may presume outrageous familiarity with me, my lord, but I needn’t return the compliment.”

He released a breath that sounded like relief. “Then they’re not. At least not yet, I’m guessing. That’s fine then. Just fine.” He folded his hands in his lap.

“You seem happy about that.”

“I am not unhappy.”

“My lord.” She set down her cup. “Do you know unsavory news of the duke, perhaps, from your cousin’s—that is, your deceased cousin’s former business dealings with him?”

“Not at all.” His eyes shot wide. “Deuce take it! I forgot to attend your lesson with Ben this morning. No doubt you called on Mrs. Josephs in my absence.” He craned his neck about. “Mrs. Josephs?”

She awoke with a start and looked about. “Has that big slab of granite gone already?”

“He made a swift assessment, it seems,” Rey said.

“Well, a fellow don’t have to look for more than a moment to see something he can like here.” He grinned. “Was just saying that to Ben the other day, in fact, right about the time I was wiping myself up off the floor after sparring.”

The image of Ben sparring with Mr. Viking earlier came to her abruptly and her entire body got hot.

“How did he come to be an expert swordsman?” she said.

“Practice.” He snatched up another cake. “A great lot of practice, since we were little chaps. From the day he found that old sword in the dust alongside that cane field, he never put it down. Mustn’t have even been seven at the time.” He chewed thoughtfully. “And we had a splendid teacher.”

“But he is not . . .” What he had done in the ballroom, touching her like that—she had not anticipated it. “He is not an aggressive man.” Usually. “I would think a man must want to hurt someone to become so proficient at being able to do so.”

“Oh, he does, believe you me,” Lord Michaels said with utter assurance. “It’s just that he directs it all into that sword. No need to bluster about pushing everybody around when you know you can skewer them through quick as lightning, what?” He grinned.

At the door the footman said, “Her ladyship, the Baroness of Easterberry, and Mrs. Westin and Miss Anderson.”

“Good day,” Lady Easterberry said as she swept into the room. Edinburgh society’s greatest gossip, her circle of friends was wide and her interest in everybody’s business insatiable. “Maude, Patience, I must have a private tête-a-tête with Lady Regina. Do entertain Lord Michaels.”

Miss Anderson, a pretty girl of no more than seventeen, stammered and blushed. But she accepted a seat beside the baron, and her elder sister sat too. Lady Easterberry linked her arm through Rey’s and drew her toward the window.

“My dear,” she said in a hush, “it was not a quarter hour after you and Lord Michaels departed my home yesterday that I heard the most extraordinary news.”

“Do tell, my lady.” Rey ducked her head to come closer to the baroness’s furtive whisper. She was a small woman, like her daughters in both height and the glow of her cheeks.

“But first I must ask.” She released Rey’s arm. “Was that the Duke of Loch Tay I saw riding away from this very house just now?”

“It was.”

She clasped her hands together. “Then the rumors are true. He is courting you.”

“How any rumor of that could exist when he has only called upon me for the first time since we were children, I am at a loss to know,” she said with a smile. “But do tell me your news, my lady. You have piqued my curiosity.”

“In fact it is news of the Devil’s Duke!” she said in a whisper and leaned closer. “I spoke with Lady Melville only an hour ago and she insists that Loch Tay is not the man we have all been imagining him.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, indeed. She says we should all be pointing the blame for the disappearances of those girls at another man entirely, a lowborn man.”

“Lowborn?”

“She has cause to believe that the person who absconded with those poor innocent girls was a merchant.” Her mouth twisted up in a grimace.

“How interesting! What sort of merchant?”

“Oh, well, whatever sort is the most depraved, of course.”

“I see. Does Lady Melville have this man’s name?” Or any reason to blame him for the missing girls.

“That is the most remarkable thing, for she learned it from her housekeeper who overheard it at the fish market in Leith. Filthy, smelly place. I have never been there, of course.”  
“Naturally. What did her housekeeper overhear?”

“A man whose ship came into port only twice last year, in September and then again in December, happened to be letting Loch Tay’s house here in town on both of those occasions. He departed Edinburgh mere days after that girl’s cloak was found by the loch. Do you see? Everybody assumed the duke had something to do with it, but in fact another person altogether was living in his house.”

“Good heavens. That does seem like damning evidence.” If one discounted the merchant’s captain, crew, and servants who would have been in Edinburgh at the same times, as well as every other sailor and merchant who made port in Leith then, not to mention Lord Michaels and Sir Lorian Snoke who had both been in town on those occasions. “What is the merchant’s name?”

“That,” she whispered, casting her daughters and the baron a quick glance and lowering her voice further, “is the most distressing piece of it all. For, naturally, I sent my page early this morning to the dockyard to discover it. The merchant in question, Lady Regina, is a man by the name of Solo. He is our dear, charming Lord Michaels’s cousin!”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it so far!!! second chap will be up soon!!! Follow me on twitter and on Instagram as @AdamDriverLatam


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